On Good Friday, 27 March 1959, a married woman named Hazel Woodard—a resident of a small town called Laurel, in Sarasota County, Florida—was watching television, when a shot came through the screen door and struck her between the eyes. She died the next day in hospital. The bullet that had killed her had been fired by a .22 pistol.
Sheriff Ross Boyer interviewed virtually everybody in the town, and everyone seemed to agree that Hazel Woodard, a retired schoolteacher, had no enemies. Then, looking at the TV guide, Boyer noticed an odd coincidence: at the time Hazel Woodard had been shot, a programme called ‘The Sniper’ had just been shown on television.
One of the residents they interviewed was a man named Norman Smith, who lived in a caravan half a mile from the Woodard home, and who made a living from sea shells. Smith denied owning a gun, and said he had been with a friend all evening. Asked if he had watched ‘The Sniper’ he shook his head. ‘Afraid I missed it.’
Further investigations produced a promising lead. Two residents mentioned a Peeping Tom who peered through bedroom windows—in fact, one of them had fired a shot to scare him off. And a third man was finally able to tell them the Peeping Tom’s identity—Norman Smith. The sheriff immediately checked with the friend with whom Smith claimed to have spent the evening. This man agreed that he had—but said he had left soon after they had finished watching ‘The Sniper’. When he also told the police that Smith owned a .22 pistol, they returned to the caravan and took Smith in for questioning. Smith denied the shooting, and agreed to a lie detector test; it showed that he was lying. Soon after this, Smith cracked and confessed to shooting Mrs Woodard. He had been watching ‘The Sniper’, and after his friend had left, had simply taken the gun and gone out to find someone to shoot…
When I came across this case, it struck me as so odd that I mentioned it in the preface to the Encyclopedia of Murder that I was then compiling, classifying it as a ‘crime of boredom’. I pointed out that, in that sense, it resembled the 1924 case of the two Chicago students, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, who had become fascinated by Nietzsche’s gospel of the Superman, and killed 14-year-old Bobby Franks to show that they had no respect for man-made laws. I had argued that the ‘crime of boredom’ is a result of a moral vacuum that springs out of a sense of being free, but of having nothing to do with our freedom. Dostoevsky had explored the problem in The Devils, where the anti-hero Stavrogin complains that he had never found anything to do with his strength, and has consequently committed a whole series of meaningless acts, some of them criminal, merely to escape a sense of futility and meaninglessness.
It was also in 1959 that a pretty blonde named Penny Bjorkland, of Daly City, California, accepted a lift from a gardener named August Norry and shot him to death. Trapped by the evidence of the bullet, she explained that she wanted to see if she could kill a man ‘and not worry about it afterwards’.
Now in fact, it is obvious that no crime is really ‘motiveless’. Penny Bjorkland’s shooting may have been motivated by childhood abuse. Norman Smith’s random sniping may have been a form of sexual aggression, like that of a later New York serial killer, David Berkowitz, known as ‘Son of Sam’. And the murder committed by Leopold and Loeb was clearly an act of ego-assertion. They felt that they were immensely superior to their fellow students, but it was necessary to do something to prove it to themselves.
I saw in this type of ‘motiveless crime’ an ominous portent for the future. And this feeling crystallized when I read of a mass murder that took place in Mesa, Arizona, on 13 November 1966, when an 18-year-old student named Robert Benjamin Smith walked into a hairdressing parlour called the Rose-Mar College of Beauty, ordered four young women and a 3-year-old girl to lie face downward on the floor, then shot them all in the back of the head. Asked why he did it, Smith said: ‘I wanted to get known, to get myself a name.’ He added: ‘I knew I had to kill a lot of people to get my name in the newspapers all over the world.’
Such a motive seems absurd and incomprehensible—until we recall the Greek Herostratus, who in 356 BC burnt down the temple of Artemis at Ephesus ‘to make his name immortal’. In 1938 Sartre wrote a story called ‘Herostratus’ about a man who decided to shoot half a dozen people at random for the same reason (the first of the ‘crazy gunmen’).
Now, as most contemporary psychologists acknowledge, the hunger for self-esteem is one of the most basic human urges. The first to develop this notion as a basis for psychotherapy was Freud’s disciple (later his opponent) Alfred Adler, who argued that man has turned his physical inferiority to animals to his advantage by developing his brain. And in the same way, physically weak individuals compensate for their inferiority to stronger ones by developing their intelligence. This becomes their source of ‘superiority’ and self-esteem. Adler suggested that the ‘inferiority complex’ is the most basic cause of neurosis.
The American psychologist Abraham Maslow found himself torn between the Freudian explanation of neurosis (sexual repression) and the Adlerian (inferiority) until it struck him that both play a fundamental role. Maslow reconciled them by creating his theory of the ‘hierarchy of needs.’
What Maslow suggested, briefly, is this. If human beings are at the bottom of the social scale, their chief desire is just to stay alive—to have the basic means of subsistence. A man who has been half-starved since birth feels that if only he could have three good meals a day, he would be ecstatically happy. But if this level of need is satisfied, the next emerges: for security, a roof over one’s head (every tramp daydreams of retiring to a cottage with roses round the door). If this level is satisfied, the next emerges—the sexual level: not just the need for sex, but for love, for companionship. And if this level is satisfied, the next need emerges: to be recognized and respected: in other words, the need for self-esteem. And if this level is satisfied, a final level sometimes (though not always) emerges: what Maslow called ‘self-actualization’—creativity: not necessarily writing novels or symphonies, but the need to do something well merely for the sake of doing it well. Even stamp collecting counts as self-actualization.
Cases like that of Robert Smith made me aware that a new level of crime was beginning to emerge as a successor to ‘the age of sex crime’: what might be called the crime of self-esteem. This was followed by the insight that in the past two centuries, society itself has passed through the levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In the days of the Newgate Calendar (1774), that immense compilation of criminal cases, sex crime was virtually unknown; criminals were too busy merely staying alive to bother about rape. When rape did occur it was often treated with remarkable leniency: in the Encyclopedia, I cite a nineteenth-century record that mentions a man being sentenced to death for stealing a loaf of bread, and a man who received two weeks in jail for raping a servant girl.
In the Victorian age, with its higher level of prosperity, Maslow’s second level emerges: crime committed for domestic security. Belle Gunness epitomizes it perfectly: what she wanted was not just cash, but the ideal home and the social security that goes with it.
The third level of need, the sexual level, begins to emerge in the second half of the nineteenth century, and is symbolized by Jack the Ripper. The age of sex crime had begun.
And now, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, we see the emergence of the next level: self-esteem. This is the ultimate motivation of Peter Manuel, Werner Boost, Melvin Rees.
But at this point, a serious objection occurs. These three men were, after all, sex criminals. Yet we only have to compare them with ‘sex maniacs’ like Earle Nelson, Harvey Glatman or Heinrich Pommerencke—or even Ed Gein—to see that there is a major difference. The typical rapist killer is suffering from a kind of sexual starvation, and he ‘steals’ sex as a starving man might steal food. He recognizes it as wrong, but the compulsion is overwhelming. The self-esteem killer denies that what he is doing is wrong. Like some bomb-throwing revolutionary, he feels that society is somehow to blame—or God, or the laws of nature. It is true that he is a sex criminal, but sex is no longer the basic driving force. What such men are really interested in is power, self-esteem. Sartre catches it perfectly in a scene in ‘Herostratus’ in which the hero goes to a prostitute and simply makes her remove her clothes and walk about the room, while he sits in an armchair, fully clothed, holding a revolver in his lap. He explains elsewhere in the story that he never indulges in sexual intercourse; he feels this would be a kind of surrender to a woman who is his inferior.
Here, suddenly, we can grasp the reason for the sadism involved in so many modern sex crimes. The sex is inextricably entangled with the craving for self-esteem, for personal ‘superiority’. And as soon as we see this, we can also see that this throws a new light on the fantasies of the Marquis de Sade. Sade had a keen sense of his own intellectual superiority, yet it was being continually challenged by those in authority. Sade’s novels are authoritarian daydreams rather than sexual daydreams. This is why he devotes as much time to intellectual argument as to sexual fantasy. We may see Sade as an ‘in-betweener’, someone who is in between two levels of Maslow’s hierarchy, sex and self-esteem.
Maslow’s hierarchy also suggests why so many burglars urinate and defecate in the course of robbery. As a crime, burglary belongs to the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy—the need for subsistence and security. But the sexual level is also beginning to emerge, and it is sexual excitement that prompts the urge to ‘do something dirty’ as well as merely stealing property. Lowering the trousers is essentially a sexual act. And here again, the crime involves two adjacent levels of Maslow’s hierarchy, and the criminal may be seen as an ‘in-betweener’.
Maslow’s ‘hierarchy’ is about human evolution. And this in turn explains why human beings are capable of so much more violence and cruelty than animals: in man, this evolutionary urge is far more acute and painful.
And what of Maslow’s next level, self-actualization? We can also see the increasing emergence of this level in the latter part of the twentieth century: for example, in the increasing interest in the ‘expansion of consciousness’, in yoga, in ‘occultism’, in the ‘psychedelic revolution’ and virtual reality. Now it can be found in any town or village anywhere—even the small Cornish village where I live has a yoga group.
Now, self-actualizers do not commit crimes—at least, not murder. For example, there is no known example of a writer or artist committing a premeditated murder. (A few have killed men in duels, or—like the composer Gesualdo, who caught his wife in bed with a lover—in a fit of jealousy; but never a coldly calculated killing.) Shaw underlined the point by observing that we judge an artist by his highest moments, a criminal by his lowest. Once a man has decided that he is an artist—one of the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’—then he has achieved a level of self-esteem at which crime is no longer a valid option. There is a sense in which he feels ‘above’ society as Sartre’s Herostratus feels ‘above’ sex with prostitutes.
There is, nevertheless, a point at which sex, self-esteem and self-actualization mingle rather uncomfortably. The level of self-actualization is, for example, the religious level, and there are many examples of religious prophets and ‘messiahs’ who are still entangled in the need for sex and self-esteem. The usual assumption is that such men are simply confidence tricksters who prey on the gullible, like Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry. But this is not necessarily true. Many possess a genuine urge to self-transcendence, but still mixed with sex and self-esteem urges. Edward Wilson, who preferred to be called Brother Twelve, possessed remarkable religious gifts, which emerge clearly in his writings.1 But as soon as he became a successful prophet, he engaged in seduction and became a kind of power-maniac, who finally absconded with the money collected from his disciples. The Revd. Jim Jones, who ordered nine hundred disciples to commit mass suicide in Guyana in 1978, also seems to have started out with genuine religious inspiration. So did Jeffrey Lundgren, a breakaway Mormon who started a religious community in Kirtland, Ohio, in the 1980s. Lundgren invented a ceremony called Intercession, in which female disciples had to dance naked in front of him, while he masturbated into their panties, explaining that his shedding of semen was analogous to Christ’s shedding of his blood for the redemption of sin. Lundgren eventually ordered his followers to murder a family of five disciples, whom he accused of backsliding, and was sentenced to death in 1990.2
A certain scepticism is inevitable in considering such cases; it is easier to dismiss such ‘messiahs’ as confidence men. Yet unless we can grasp that genuine ‘self-actualization’ needs can be entangled with sex and self-esteem needs, we fail to grasp an important aspect of what has been happening since the 1960s. When the Charles Manson ‘family’ came to trial in 1970, the general public was thoroughly confused by Manson’s attempt to turn the trial into an indictment of bourgeois society. Manson explained: ‘You made my children what they are.’ Asked if she thought the killing of eight people was unimportant, Susan Atkins countered by asking if the killing of thousands of people with napalm was important. It looked like thoroughly muddled logic. Yet it is only necessary to read some of the interviews Manson has given in prison, or watch them on videotape, to recognize that Manson still believes that his ‘philosophy’ was really about self-actualization, and that the murders were intended as a kind of violent protest against a society that denied him self-actualization. Again, on 9 October 1970, an ecology enthusiast named John Linley Frazier murdered eye surgeon Victor Ohta and his family, leaving behind a note that declaimed against those who ‘misuse the natural environment’, and concluding: ‘Materialism must die or mankind will stop.’
It is also worth bearing in mind that Frazier, like the Manson family—and most of the hippies in the 1960s—spent a great deal of his time on ‘acid trips’. And one of the effects of psychedelic drugs is to produce visions of ‘transcendence’ which authorities like Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary and Arthur Koestler agree to be valid, rather than some kind of drug-induced delusion. On the other hand, drugs are clearly a short cut to ‘expanded states of awareness’, which explains why such states are usually unstable.
This also explains why criminals like Manson and Frazier are so puzzling and difficult to place: because they are ‘in-betweeners’, existing uneasily between the levels of self-esteem and self-actualization.
It seems likely that this is also the key to one of the most sensational murder cases of the decade: the ‘Moors murders’—a case that, as journalist Fred Harrison commented, ‘has tormented the psyche of a nation’. On 19 April 1966, Ian Brady, 28, and Myra Hindley, 23, appeared in court in Chester, accused of three murders: two of children, Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride, one of a teenage boy, Edward Evans. They were also believed to have killed Pauline Reade, 16, and Keith Bennett, 12, but the bodies had not been found.
What produced the sense of shock was that a young girl—and apparently one who loved animals and children—should have participated in the sex murder of children. Commentators on the case seemed divided between those who thought Brady a hypnotic Svengali, and those who thought they were probably both equally bad. In his introduction to The Trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Jonathan Goodman makes it clear that he simply regards Brady as a monster. More insight is provided by Jean Ritchie in Myra Hindley: Inside the Mind of a Murderess (1988), who seems to have based part of her account on interviews with Brady’s foster parents.
Ian Brady—christened Ian Duncan Stewart—was born on 2 January 1938 in Glasgow; his mother, 28-year-old Margaret Stewart, worked as a waitress in hotel tea-rooms; his father was a Glasgow journalist, who died three months before Ian’s birth. Margaret Stewart did her best to support the child, farming him out to babysitters when she had to work in the evening, but finally advertised for a full-time ‘childminder’. Mary and John Sloan took him into ‘their warm and friendly home’, where his mother, who now called herself Peggy, came to visit him every Sunday, bringing him clothes and presents. So it hardly seems that Ian Brady can be classified with Carl Panzram as someone who was subjected to childhood neglect and brutality.
Jean Ritchie has one highly significant story to tell: how, at the age of 9, he was taken on a picnic to the shores of Loch Lomond.
For Ian it was a day of discovery. He discovered in himself a deep affinity with the wild, rugged and empty scenery around the lake. He was moved by the grandeur of the hills, awed by the vastness of the sky. When it was time to go home, the family found him halfway up one of the hills, standing still absorbing something—who knows what?—from the strange, open, inspiring scenery around him. It was an unusual Ian who came down the hill, one who babbled happily about his day out to his foster sisters…
This story sounds as if it came from the Sloan family, and it is supported by other comments from those who knew him: for example, Lord Longford, who visited him in prison. The latter is also on record as saying that Brady knew his Tolstoy and Dostoevsky better than anyone he had known. Others have spoken of his interest in Nietzsche. This hardly sounds like the sadistic psychopath described by Goodman.
What most writers on the case seem agreed upon is that Brady was—as Jean Ritchie puts it—‘a loner, an outsider’. He was also a highly dominant child at school, a born leader, who seems to have embarked on burglary at an early age (9 has been quoted)—not, as in the case of Panzram, out of envy of contemporaries from wealthier backgrounds, but simply out of devilment.
When he was 10, the family were moved from the Gorbals to a new council estate at Pollock, with—as Jean Ritchie says—‘indoor bathroom and lavatory, a garden and nearby fields’. At the age of 11 he started attending Shawlands Academy, a school for above-average pupils, but seems to have taken a certain pleasure in misbehaving, perhaps in reaction against richer schoolmates.
At the age of 13 he came before a juvenile court for burglary, but was bound over; nine months later, he was again bound over for the same thing. At 16 he appeared again before a Glasgow court with nine charges against him. This time he was put on probation on condition that he joined his mother in Manchester. Margaret Stewart had moved there when her son was 12, and had married a meat porter named Patrick Brady, whose name Ian was to take.
His stepfather found him a job in the fruit market. He was still a loner, spending hours in his room reading. But in November 1955, he was again in court, this time on a charge of aiding and abetting. A lorry driver had asked him to load some stolen lead onto his lorry. The scrap dealer gave him away to the police, and he in turn implicated Brady. In court, Brady pleaded guilty, expecting a fine for such a trivial offence—after all, everybody in the market was ‘on the fiddle’. But because he was on probation, the judge decided that severity was called for. To his bewilderment—and rage—Brady was remanded to Strangeways jail to await his sentence.
There he spent three months among professional criminals, and deliberately cultivated fences, cracksmen, even killers. He had made up his mind that society was going to get what it deserved. This reaction—reminiscent of Joseph Smith, Carl Panzram, Peter Manuel and Werner Boost—is typical of the high-dominance male faced with what he considers outrageous injustice. The two-year Borstal sentence that followed only confirmed the decision—particularly when, in an open Borstal at Hatfield, he found himself in further trouble. He had been selling home-distilled liquor and running a book on horses and dogs. One day, after getting drunk and having a fight with a warder, he was transferred to an altogether tougher Borstal housed in Hull prison. This, says Jean Ritchie, ‘was where he prepared himself to become a big-time criminal’. The aim was to become wealthy as quickly as possible, so he could enjoy the freedom he dreamed about. This was why he studied book-keeping in prison—to learn to handle money.
Three months in Strangeways and two years in Borstal had turned a youth with a minor criminal record and a tendency to bookishness into an antisocial rebel. Even taking into account the fact that he had been on probation, the ineptitude of the law seems incredible.
He was released at the end of two years, but remained on probation for another three. When he was released, he returned home to Manchester, as he had to under the terms of the probation. But Fred Harrison, the journalist who interviewed Brady in prison, and who wrote a book on the case,3 has an interesting passage that makes it clear that Brady soon became actively involved in crime. He speaks of a Borstal friend named Deare, who delivered a stolen Jaguar to Manchester—not to Brady but to another man. The car was to be used in a ‘job’. The other man, says Harrison, made the mistake of not getting rid of the Jaguar after the ‘job’, and was arrested. He gave Deare’s name to the police. Deare subsequently vanished, and Harrison suggests that Brady was responsible. Now in fact, Gilbert Deare was still around at the time of Brady’s arrest for the Moors murders, and died some time later in a drowning accident. On this topic, Harrison is inaccurate. But the significance of the passage is that it makes clear that Brady was involved in crimes that required a getaway car soon after he returned to Manchester, and that he had at least two accomplices. What is also clear is that Brady spent a great deal of time ‘casing’ banks and building societies, watching the transportation of money.
But apart from one brush with the law for being drunk and disorderly, Brady managed to stay out of trouble. His probation officer obliged him to take a labouring job in a brewery, which he understandably detested. In 1959, at the age of 21, he succeeded in changing this for something less disagreeable; the book-keeping training led to a job as a stock clerk with Millwards Ltd, a small chemical firm. He was a careful and neat worker, although inclined to be unpunctual, and to slip out of the office to place bets with a local bookmaker. But he remained a loner, spending the lunch hour alone in the office, reading books which included Mein Kampf and other volumes on Nazism.
What seems clear, then, is that Ian Brady was turned into a criminal by a sense of injustice. Whether this attitude was justified is beside the point; given his background, and the two years in Borstal, it was inevitable. Although a loner as a child, he was by no means an outcast among his contemporaries, who regarded him as a daredevil. His brushes with the law had been infrequent, and he was treated leniently until the lead episode. In the Manchester fruit market he was ‘on the fiddle’—like everyone else—but was basically prepared to settle down. The decision to remand him to Strangeways was the true origin of the Moors murders.
Among writers on the case there has been a fairly conceited effort to represent Brady as a mindless devotee of violent comics and book with titles like The Kiss of the Whip. This is clearly inaccurate, since his reading included Crime and Punishment and Thus Spake Zarathustra, as well as Sade’s Justine (the early ‘non-pornographic’ version of 1787). Fred Harrison records that Brady discovered Crime and Punishment in the Manchester public library in 1958, around the time of his twentieth birthday. Its hero, Raskolnikov, justifies his murder of an old woman by explaining that he asked himself what Napoleon would have done in his place—if, instead of having the opportunity to prove himself at Toulon at the age of 25, he had been a poor student in St Petersburg, who had to make his own opportunities?
This seems, in many ways, to be the key to Brady’s personality. Since childhood he had never doubted that he was a ‘somebody’. Nietzsche talks about ‘how one becomes what one is’. But how could he find a way of becoming ‘somebody?’ Beethoven never had any doubt that he was a composer, Nietzsche that he was a philosopher, Dostoevsky that he was a writer, Einstein that he was a scientist. All of them had difficult early struggles—Einstein even worked as a clerk in a patent office—but they had a sense of purpose, of what Sartre calls a ‘project’. What was Brady’s ‘project?’ To some extent it had been determined by those early forays into burglary to obtain pocket money. He wanted the opportunity to live as he wanted, to go where he wanted, at any time he felt inclined. That seemed to point to a career in crime. His aim was to make a large sum of money from robbery, then probably to retire abroad.
The second major influence was Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Anyone who wonders how an antisemitic tirade could have exercised such an immense influence on a whole generation should push aside preconceptions and try reading it, as I did in my late teens. Its keynote is reasonableness, and it reminds us that when Albert Speer first went to hear Hitler speak, expecting a ranting maniac, he was amazed to discover a man who talked quietly and rationally, almost pedantically. Hitler begins by speaking of his father, the son of a poor cottager, who set out from his home village at the age of 13, with a satchel on his back and three gulden in his pocket, to launch himself into the strange, unknown world of Vienna. He became a civil servant, then retired at 56 and became a farmer.
Hitler goes on to speak of himself.
It was at this time I began to have ideals of my own. I spent a good deal of time playing about in the open, on the long road from school, and mixing with some of the roughest of the boys, which caused my mother many anxious moments. All this tended to make me the opposite of a stay-at-home. I gave no serious thought to a profession; but I was certainly out of sympathy with the kind of career my father had followed. I think that an inborn talent for speaking now began to develop…I had become a juvenile ringleader who learned well and easily at school, but who was rather difficult to manage.
Every word must have struck Brady as a reflection of himself.
Hitler’s father was determined that he should become a civil servant; Hitler was equally determined that he would not. The conflict began when Hitler was 11, and became more bitter when, at the age of 12, he decided to become an artist.
Then, in his early teens, his father and his mother died in quick succession. He was left in poverty. And so, like his father, he was forced to go to Vienna to seek his fortune.
By this point the reader is hooked. Hitler’s description of his sufferings and poverty in Vienna are simple and undramatized. And when he goes on to speak of a corrupt society, rotten with injustice and poverty, it seems that he is speaking common sense. Suddenly, it is possible to see how Hitler exercised such an immense influence on his audiences; they felt he was simply articulating what they had always felt. He goes on to conjure up a family of seven living in a dark basement, where every minor disagreement turns into a quarrel. Sometimes the father assaults the mother in a fit of drunken rage. All religious and political and humanistic values seem an illusion. The truth is simply the brutal struggle to survive. A child brought up in such an environment is totally anti-authoritarian. When he leaves school he is cynical and resentful. And he soon ends up in a reformatory, which completes his education in self-contempt and criminality…
Hitler goes on to describe how, working in the building trade, he first came up against trade unionism and Marxism. When told he had to join the union, he refused. As he got to know his fellow workers better, he knew he could never ‘join’ them; they struck him as too stupid. Finally, when they threatened to throw him from the scaffolding, he left. By that time he had come to despise socialism, which seemed to him the glorification of the mediocre.
According to Hitler, it took him a long time to recognize the connection between socialism and the Jews. At first he was simply disgusted by the antisemitic press. Then he began to recognize the part played by Jews in socialism, particularly Marxism. It was Marxism that aroused his most furious disgust, with its dislike of entrepreneurs and—by implication—of individual enterprise. Dostoevsky had expressed the same disgust with socialism in The Possessed (a book that Brady read five times). Hitler ends his second chapter by stating ominously that ‘should the Jew, with the aid of his Marxist creed, triumph over the people of this world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity…’
It becomes possible to see why Hitler’s doctrine achieved such enormous influence. Since the collapse of communism in Russia, most people can acknowledge that they share his sentiments about Marxism. What Hitler was proposing to put in its place was a purified German nationalism based upon the greatness of the German cultural heritage—Goethe, Beethoven, Nietzsche, Wagner…The result is a highly potent brew which, when distilled into films like Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, seems to offer a simple and seductive solutions to all the problems of the modern world.
There was another element in Brady that Fred Harrison was the first to bring out: a curious black romanticism associated with death. Harrison describes how Brady became an atheist at the age of 12, when he prayed that his pet dog would not die, and his prayers remained unanswered. Two years later, cycling to a job interview, he felt giddy and halted in the doorway of a newsagent’s shop. There he saw ‘a green, warm radiation, not unattractive to the young man who tried to steady himself. The features were unformed but still recognizable. Ian knew that he was looking at The Face of Death…he instantly knew that his salvation was irrevocably bound to its demands. “I’ll do it a favour, and…it will do me favours.” The bond with death was fused by the green radiation.’
For two years Brady worked quietly at Millwards, reading, learning German and playing records—including Hitler speeches—and almost certainly continued to keep in touch with ex-Borstal friends and plan ‘jobs’. Then, on Monday 16 January 1961, an 18-year-old shorthand typist named Myra Hindley came to work at Millwards, and Ian Brady dictated her first letter. She was four and a half years younger than Brady, a completely normal working-class girl, not bad-looking, with a blonde hair-do and bright lipstick, interested in boys and dancing. She had been born a Catholic, brought up a Protestant, and returned to Catholicism when she was 16. When she was 4, the birth of a sister made the home too cramped, and she went to live with her grandmother nearby. This was not particularly traumatic since she could spend as much time as she liked at her home around the corner.
At school she received good marks and wrote poetry and excellent English essays. She played the mouth organ and was known as a high-spirited tomboy.
She had been engaged but had broken it off, finding the boy ‘immature’. This was one of the problems for working-class girls at that time, whose notions of male attractiveness were formed by cinema and television—hard-bitten heroes with strong jaws, or charismatic rebels like James Dean and Elvis Presley. By contrast, the youths they met at dance halls seemed commonplace and boring.
Ian Brady was certainly not that. He had slightly sulky good looks reminiscent of Elvis Presley, and a dry and forceful manner. His self-possession was intriguing. So was his total lack of interest in her. Myra’s infatuation blossomed, and she confided it to her red diary. ‘Ian looked at me today.’ ‘Wonder if Ian is courting. Still feel the same.’ ‘Haven’t spoken to him yet.’ Then: ‘Spoken to him. He smiles as though embarrassed.’ On 1 August: ‘Ian’s taking sly looks at me at work.’ But by November: ‘I’ve given up with Ian. He goes out of his way to annoy me…’ Then, on 22 December 1961: ‘Out with Ian!’ They went to see the film King of Kings, the life story of Jesus. Just over a week later, on the divan bed in her gran’s front room, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley became lovers. ‘I hope Ian and I love each other all our lives and get married and are happy ever after.’
Many books on the Moors murder case imply that Brady’s attitude towards her was cold and manipulative. In fact, it seems to have been exceptionally close. Myra was overawed and fascinated by her lover. She declared later: ‘Within months he had convinced me there was no God at all: he could have told me the earth was flat, the moon was made of green cheese and the sun rose in the west, I would have believed him.’ Brady is on record as saying that the relationship was so close that they were virtually telepathic. They spent every Saturday night together, went on for visits to the moors on Ian’s motorbike, taking bottles of German wine, read the same books, and went to see his favourite films, such as Compulsion, based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case.
Now he had a female partner, but the central problem remained: how to escape the boring rut of working-class existence, and find a more fulfilling way of life. According to Fred Harrison, it was early in 1963—after they had been lovers for a year—that Brady suggested that the two of them should collaborate on robbing a bank or a store. But this raises some obvious questions. Brady already had at least two criminal contacts; it is unlikely that he took a year to tell Myra about them, and about his plans for a payroll robbery. It seems far more likely that she knew about these plans from the beginning. At all events, it is clear from her later admissions to Detective Chief Superintendent Topping that he had no trouble persuading her to participate.
For a payroll robbery it would be necessary to possess a car. Myra began to take driving lessons, and passed her test at the first attempt. Also at about this time, Brady took up photography, and bought a camera with a timing device. He took photographs of Myra in black crotchless panties; she photographed him holding his erect penis; then, using: a tuning device, they photographed themselves having sexual intercourse. The intention, apparently, was to make money selling the pictures.
In April 1963, he wrote to her that he would be surveying an ‘investment establishment’ (i.e. bank or building society) in the Stockport Road. In June 1963, Brady moved into the house of Myra’s gran, and Myra acquired a car, a second hand minivan. It was then, according to Harrison, that he began to talk to her about committing a murder.
In a letter to the press in January 1990, Brady wrote that the murders were ‘the product of an existentialist philosophy, in tandem with the spiritualism of Death itself’. What seems clear is that crime had become a form of dark romanticism, and that this philosophy was based on Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Sade.
The first ‘Moors murder’, that of Pauline Reade, happened on 12 July 1963, a month after Brady had moved in with Myra. The only account we have of the murder is from the confession Myra Hindley made to Topping in January 1987. According to Myra, she picked up Pauline Reade—who was 16—in the minivan, and asked her to help her come and look for an expensive glove which she had lost at a picnic on Saddleworth Moor. She offered her a pile of gramophone records in exchange. When they had been on the moor about an hour, Brady arrived on his motorbike, and was introduced as Myra’s boyfriend. Brady and Pauline then went off to look for the glove, while Myra waited in the car. Later Brady returned to the car, and took her to Pauline’s body. Her throat had been cut and her clothes were in disarray, indicating rape. They then buried the body with the spade that Myra had brought in the back of the van.
In his open letter of 1990, Brady claimed that Myra had been involved in the actual killing, and had also made some kind of sexual assault on Pauline Reade. On the whole, his account sounds the more plausible. Myra’s account of the murders invariably has her elsewhere at the time, and Topping admits that Myra told the truth only in so far as it suited her.
It seems clear that Brady was now totally in the grip of the criminal-outsider syndrome. The plans for the payroll robbery—or robberies—were well advanced. And so were plans for more murders. The one thing we know for certain about sex crime is that it is addictive. The satisfaction in all sex derives from the ‘forbidden’, but the forbiddenness is diluted by the need for mutual consent; rape—possessing a woman without her consent—is like undiluted corn liquor. Few rape killers have succeeded in stopping of their own accord. But it is also important to grasp that the murders were only a part of Brady’s ‘agenda’.
In October 1963, three months after the murder of Pauline Reade, Ian Brady made the acquaintance of 16-year-old David Smith, the husband of Myra’s sister Maureen (who was now also working at Milllwards). Smith was a big youth who had been a member of a street gang and had been in trouble with the law. Soon David and Maureen took a trip to Lake District with Ian and Myra, where they sailed on Windermere. While not homosexual, Smith experienced an emotional attraction to males; soon he was almost as completely under Brady’s spell as Myra was.
On Saturday 23 November, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley drove to the small market town of Ashton-under-Lyne. A 12-year-old boy named John Kilbride had spent Saturday afternoon at the cinema, then went to earn a few pence doing odd jobs for stallholders at the market. It began to get dark and a fog came down from the Pennines. At that moment, a friendly lady approached him and asked him if he wanted a lift. It seemed safe enough, so he climbed in. It was the last time he was seen alive. Later, Brady was to take a photograph of Myra kneeling on his grave on the moor.
On 16 June 1964, 12-year-old Keith Bennett set out to spend the night at his grandmother’s house in the Longsight district. When his mother called to collect him the following morning, he had failed to arrive. Like John Kilbride, Keith Bennett had accepted a lift from a kind lady. His body has never been found.
Meanwhile, David Smith’s admiration for his mentor was steadily increasing. Brady took him up to Saddleworth Moor and they engaged in pistol practice—Myra had obtained two pistols by the expedient of joining the Cheadle Rifle Club. Myra was not entirely happy about this intimacy; her attitude to Smith had an undertone of hostility; in fact, both of them were getting sick of the Smiths. She was glad when her gran was rehoused in Wardle Brook Avenue, in the suburb of Hattersley, in September 1964, and she and Ian moved into the little house at the end of a terrace. Nevertheless, Ian continued to consolidate his influence over David. If he was going to rob banks, a partner would be needed. Soon David Smith was recording in a notebook sentences like: ‘God is a disease, a plague, a weight round a man’s neck’ and ‘Rape is not a crime, it is a state of mind. God is a disease which eats away a man’s instincts, murder is a hobby and a supreme pleasure.’ Soon he and Brady were ‘casing’ banks and drawing up elaborate plans.
One day Brady asked him: ‘Is there anyone you hate and want out of the way?’
Smith mentioned several names, including an old rival named Tony Latham. After some discussion, they settled on Tony Latham as the murder victim. But first, Brady explained, he would need a photograph. This was no problem. Smith had a polaroid camera, and he knew the pub where Latham drank. The next evening, Ian and Myra drove him to the pub, then drove away. Unfortunately, Smith had forgotten to insert the film, and when he went into the toilet to develop the photograph, found the camera empty.
When he went out to Wardle Brook Avenue to confess his failure, Brady seemed to take it casually enough. In reality he did not believe Smith was telling the truth and was alarmed. Now, suddenly, David Smith was a potential risk. If he had participated in the murder of Tony Latham, he would have been bound to Ian and Myra. Now Brady began to think seriously about removing him. Oddly enough, it was Myra who dissuaded him. It would hurt Mo’ (Maureen).
On 26 December 1964, there was another murder. Like the others, this was planned in advance. Myra had arranged for her grandmother to stay the night with an uncle at Dukinfield. At about six o’clock that evening, she picked up 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey at a fair in Hulme Hall Lane. In her ‘confession’ to Topping, Myra gave her own version of what happened. They took Lesley back to the house in Wardle Brook Avenue, and switched on a tape recorder. Myra claims that she was in the kitchen when she heard the child screaming. Brady was squeezing her neck and ordering her to take off her coat. Lesley was then made to undress, and to assume various pornographic poses, while Brady filmed her. On the tape, Myra can be heard ordering her to ‘put it in, put it in tighter’, presumably referring to the gag that appears in the photographs. Lesley screams and asks to be allowed to go home. At this point, Myra claims she was ordered to go and run a bath; she stayed in the bathroom until the water became cold. When she returned, Lesley had been strangled, and there was blood on her thighs. The following day they took the body to the moors and buried it.
In his open letter to the press, Brady denies that Myra played no active part in the murder. ‘She insisted upon killing Lesley Ann Downey with her own hands, using a two foot length of silk cord, which she later used to enjoy toying with in public, in the secret knowledge of what it had been used for.’
Brady had killed approximately once every six months since July 1963: Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey. For some reason, July 1965 went by—as far as we know—without a further murder. But in September, Brady decided to kill out of sequence. The aim seems to have been to cement David Smith’s membership of the ‘gang’ (which fairly certainly involved other people beside himself and Myra). According to Smith, during a drinking session on 25 September Brady asked Smith: ‘Have you ever killed anybody? I have—three or four. The bodies are buried up on the moors.’
Two weeks later, on 6 October, Smith turned up at Wardle Brook Avenue—he was now living close by, in a council flat in Hattersley—hoping to borrow some money, but they were all broke. Brady had already suggested that they should rob an electricity board showroom, and the robbery had been planned for two days later. Smith’s urgent need for money to pay the rent suggested that now was the time to ‘cement’ him beyond all possibility of withdrawal. (It seems unlikely that this robbery would involve only three of them—after all, Smith was totally inexperienced.)
Towards midnight, Myra called at her sister’s flat with a message for their mother, then asked David Smith to walk her home. As he stood waiting in the kitchen—expecting to be offered a drink—there was a scream from the sitting room, and Myra called ‘Dave, help him!’ As Smith ran in, Ian Brady was hacking at the head of a youth who was lying on the floor. In spite of blow after blow, the youth continued to twist and scream. Finally, when he lay still, Brady pressed a cushion over the face and tied a cord around the throat to stop the gurgling noises. Brady handed Smith the hatchet. ‘Feel the weight of that.’ Smith’s fingers left bloodstained prints on the handle.
Gran called down to ask what the noise was about, and Myra shouted that she had dropped a tape recorder on her foot.
When the room had been cleaned up, the body was carried upstairs between them—Brady commented: ‘Eddie’s a dead weight.’ The victim was 17-year-old Edward Evans, who had been picked up in a pub that evening.
They all drank tea, while Myra reminisced about a policeman who had stopped to talk to her while Brady was burying a body. After this, Smith agreed to return with an old pram the next day, and help in the disposal of Edward Evans.
When he arrived home Smith was violently sick. And when he told Maureen what had happened, it was she who decided to go to the police.
At eight o’clock the next morning, a man dressed as a baker’s roundsman knocked on the door of 16 Wardle Brook Avenue. Myra answered the door, still rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. The man identified himself as a police officer, and said he had reason to believe there was a body in the house. Brady was on the divan bed in the living room, writing a note to explain why he was not going to work that day. Upstairs, the police demanded to see into a locked room. When Myra said the key was at work, a policeman offered to go and fetch it. At this, Brady said: ‘You’d better tell him. There was a row here last night. It’s in there.’ Under the window in the bedroom there was a plastic wrapped bundle. Two loaded revolvers were found in the same room.
David Smith told the police that Brady had stored two suitcases in the left luggage at Manchester Central Station, and these were recovered. (The cloakroom ticket was later found where Brady had described it—in the spine of a prayer book.) These proved to contain pornographic photographs—including nine of Lesley Ann Downey—the tape of Lesley Ann pleading to be allowed to leave, various books on sex and torture, and wigs, coshes and notes on robbing banks. Other photographs led them to dig on the moors, where the bodies of Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride were recovered.
On 6 May 1966, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were both sentenced to life imprisonment. There had been no confession—this was to come many years later, Brady to the journalist Fred Harrison, and then Myra to Topping. At the time, Brady maintained that Lesley had been brought to the house by two men, who had taken her away after taking the photographs. It was not until July 1987 that Brady returned to the moor, under police escort, and tried—without success—to help locate the body of Keith Bennett. Pauline Reade had already been located, with the help of Myra’s confession.
It is easy to understand why the Moors murders have ‘tormented the psyche of a nation’ for more than a quarter of a century. Like the Jack the Ripper murders, they seem to embody some of our worst nightmares about human cruelty. Brady has often been described as ‘Britain’s most hated murderer’. But our business is not to dwell on the horror, but to try to understand how it came about.
After she attended the trial, Pamela Hansford Johnson wrote a book about it called On Iniquity. Her argument was that Brady and Hindley seemed totally ‘affectless’, totally without feeling. This view sounds plausible enough until we recall that both killers had an enormous affection for animals, and that when she learned that her dog had died in police custody, Myra burst out: ‘They’re just a lot of bloody murderers.’ She was equally upset by the death of her sister Maureen’s baby. And Brady’s affection for his mother and stepmother—as well as for Myra—indicates that he possessed the same human feelings as the rest of us. Harrison reveals that after the arrest, he did his best to dissociate Myra from the crimes.
In fact, from the criminological view, the main interest of the Moors case is that it reveals so clearly the basic psychological patterns of a certain type of antisocial behaviour.
One of the fundamental problems of human beings, particularly in adolescence, is to discover ‘who they are’. The certainties of childhood are behind them; they face an adult world in which they have to play an active part. But unless they happen to be lucky enough to have clear ‘role models’, or to have acquired some basic enthusiasm (like art or science) in childhood or early teens, their identity remains a kind of blank, like a gap on a census form, waiting for someone to fill in a name.
In the case of a dominant male, the question is particularly acute. Biological studies have established that approximately one in twenty of any animal group is ‘dominant’—that is, 5 per cent. The dominant 5 per cent are, on the whole, natural leaders. They crave a means of expressing their dominance. Those of purely physical dominance may establish a place in life by sheer force of personality. In childhood, Brady seems to have established this kind of dominance over his contemporaries. But in his teens, it ceased to be so simple. Fred Harrison comments: ‘Ian Brady knew that he was special. He did not feel the same way as ordinary people…’ The word ‘outsider’ turns up with monotonous regularity. An American serial killer, Douglas Clark, expressed it in another way: ‘I march to a different drummer.’
Although Brady’s background was less stressful than that of Panzram, it is clear that the two years in Borstal produced much the same effect as Panzram’s early periods of imprisonment: a feeling that ‘authority’ was the enemy, and that the insult would not be forgotten or forgiven.
The years of his late teens, when he read Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Sade, and Mein Kampf, were a period of intellectual ferment in which he seems to have begun to perceive the outline of his ‘real identity’. The influence of Mein Kampf can hardly be underestimated. Even its title—my struggle—helps to explain the profound influence it still exercises among youthful right-wingers who would indignantly reject the label of ‘Nazi thugs’. To these enthusiasts, it is a kind of archetypal Hollywood success story, the autobiography of an ‘outsider’ with all the cards stacked against him, who somehow succeeded in imposing his own vision on the world. And certainly, it is as impossible to deny Hitler’s intelligence as to deny Brady’s. Moreover, with his admiration of Goethe, Beethoven, Nietzsche, Wagner, it is also impossible to deny that he must be described as an ‘idealist’.
The fly in the ointment is, of course, the racism. Any normally intelligent person knows that it is impossible to generalize about any racial group. Yet Hitler’s ‘conspiracy’ theory about Zionism and Marxism looks plausible because there is undoubtedly an element of truth in it. Swallow that particular gnat, and you are ready to swallow the camel of antisemitism and black inferiority. And then suddenly everything looks marvellously simple. It is merely necessary to embrace nationalism and racial purity to have a marvellously clear vision of a utopian society in which ‘outsiders’ are not suppressed and ignored.
This kind of oversimplification is not confined to ‘fascists’. Bernard Shaw tells how, as a poverty-stricken young man, he attended a lecture by the socialist Henry George and bought a copy of his book Progress and Poverty. It had upon him exactly the same effect as Mein Kampf on Ian Brady.
Thus a bee, desperately striving to reach a flower bed through a window pane, concludes that he is the victim of evil spirits or that he is mad, his end being exhaustion, despair and death. Yet if he only knew, there is nothing wrong with him; all he has to do is to go out as he came in, through the open window or door…Your born Communist begins like the bee on the pane. He worries himself and everybody else until he dies of peevishness, or is led by some propagandist pamphlet…to investigate the structure of our society. Immediately everything becomes clear to him. Property is theft; respectability founded on property is blasphemy; marriage founded on property is prostitution; it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. He now knows where he is, and where this society that has so intimidated him is.
Shaw swallowed socialism; Brady swallowed Nazism. As it happened, Shaw’s socialism did not lead him to acts of violence because, as a born writer, he was an instinctive self-actualizer. But many members of Red Brigades and People’s Liberation Armies use socialism as a justification for acts of violence, even murder—all in the name of the future Utopia.
With Mein Kampf, Brady had a creed, but not an identity. It was the relationship with Myra that seems to have caused this to crystallize. The German jurist Rosenstock-Huessy said: ‘Even a man who believes in nothing needs a girl to believe in him.’ Quite apart from the sexual drive—which is usually overpowering in those of high dominance—the admiration of a member of the opposite sex is like a mirror in which a man can see his own face.
But the ‘mirror’ also represents a call to action, a demand that the dominant male should assert his identity. So far he may have been content to regard ‘society’ from a distance, the aloof outsider, happy to nurse his own sense of superiority, and to daydream of the world at his feet. But when a girl accepts his dominance, it becomes urgently necessary to do something to justify her admiration. The ideal would be something that brings instant wealth and fame.
Now, unlike Shaw, Brady he had no means of achieving this. Under different circumstances, he might have turned his latent rebelliousness to account in the manner of Sade and Jean Genet—in literature of defiance. Unfortunately, although highly articulate (and the winner of essay prizes at school) Brady had never seen himself as a writer. Neither had he ever developed any early enthusiasm—for science, for art, for acting—that might have offered an outlet for his frustrated energies. But the two years in Borstal had offered him a kind of identity: as a criminal. As he read Nietzsche and Mein Kampf, he conceived himself as a kind of samurai, one who stands out from society because of his self-discipline and will-power.
With Myra, a normal girl of medium dominance who regarded him as a superior being, the need for a ‘project’ became urgent. It had to be crime, but not petty crime: something more like the Great Train Robbery. And meanwhile, while he looked around for the right opportunity, the philosophy of crime had to be put into effect on a smaller scale.
The murder of Pauline Reade was clearly a watershed. He obviously regarded it as an act of self-creation, Nietzsche’s ‘how one becomes what one is’. It involved not only dominance and self-assertion, but also risk and danger—almost like Russian roulette. After the murder, there could be no doubt who he was: he was the man who had the courage to set himself apart from society, to do what others did not dare to do, to take a risk that might bring him to the gallows. (At that time there was still capital punishment in England.) Like Raskolnikov’s murder, it was a ‘definitive act’, an act as meaningful as a monk’s vows of renunciation or a general’s attempt at a coup d’état. Now, in a sense, there could be no going back. The face that looks out of the police photograph seems to express that attitude: the eyes staring straight into the camera, the mouth firm but slightly contemptuous.
Yet in just over two years, an unexpected problem arose. Harrison records it in Brady’s own words: ‘I felt old at 26. Everything was ashes. I felt there was nothing of interest—nothing to hook myself onto. I had experienced everything.’ Lord Byron had similarly declared that his early initiation into sex—by a maidservant at the age of 9—was responsible for his later tendency to satiety and melancholy: ‘having anticipated life’.
But the problem is simpler than that. Everyone is familiar with it. Experience is ‘interesting’ only in so far as we put a certain effort, a certain attention, into it. If I really want to enjoy an experience, the best way is to think about it in advance, to build up anticipation, so that when it actually happens, I give it my full and complete attention. If I approach my experience in a casual way, taking it for granted, it soon palls. If we do not wish to be subject to this law of diminishing returns, we have to put as much into experience as we get out of it. This explains the apparently irrational behaviour of saints and ascetics, starving themselves and sleeping on bare boards. A man who is starving finds a crust and a glass of water as delicious as the most expensive meal, because discomfort has stretched his attention. This stretching of attention is like stretching a spring, or pulling back a rifle bolt: it charges the mind with vital energy. And if he could learn this trick of ‘stretching’ his attention, he could enjoy everything with the same intensity, even at the age of 90. Conversely, a youth of 16 can experience boredom and satiety by habitually relaxing the attention, taking experience for granted.
Sex is a particularly interesting case in point. Because the appetite is so powerful, we assume that it is analogous to the appetite for food, which is basically physical. In fact, as we have seen, it is almost entirely ‘mental’, based on a sense of ‘forbiddenness’. A man who badly wants a girl can work up an ‘appetite’ so powerful that she seems like a goddess, an embodiment of the eternal feminine, and the very thought of possessing her produces a foretaste of ecstasy. But because sex contains such a large mental component, it can collapse into boredom if the element of ‘preparedness’, of focused attention, is neglected.
Sex crime is particularly subject to this law of diminishing returns. Just as the starving man imagines that three good meals a day would leave him totally satisfied, just as the tramp imagines that a country cottage would make him blissfully happy, so a sex-starved man imagines that a certain sexual abundance would bring total fulfilment. All three are mistaken, because as soon as one level of need is fulfilled, another opens up.
In Brady’s case, the problem was complicated by the need to crystallize a sense of identity and purpose—Maslow’s self-esteem level. He was intelligent, determined, strong-willed—but was not sure what to do with these qualities—a situation that must have reminded him of one of his favourite fictional characters, Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin in The Possessed. At the age of 23, Brady urgently needed a ‘project’. And the only project he had been trained in was crime.
Matters were further complicated by his almost Wordsworthian mysticism about nature. (He has stated that The Prelude is one of his favourite poems.) Harrison describes how, when he wanted to talk about the murders, Brady only wanted to tell him about a childhood trip to Oban and Tobermory, which he had found enchanting. He also records that David Smith had difficulty in sharing Brady’s sense of beauty in miles of black peat moors. Such an obsession obviously belongs to Maslow’s self-actualizing level. And what distinguishes the self-actualizer—or ‘outsider’—is a tormented need for self-expression.
In short, Ian Brady was a powder-keg waiting to explode. All that was needed was a match. Myra Hindley provided the match; the moment he met her, some kind of violence became inevitable.
The reason for this lies in the psychology of what has been called folie à deux. In most murders involving two killers—other cases are Leopold and Loeb and Fernandez and Beck—there is almost invariably a leader and a follower, one of high dominance, one of medium dominance.
Maslow was also one of the first to grasp the immense significance of patterns of dominance behaviour. It all sprang from his observation of monkeys in the Bronx zoo in the mid-1930s. He was at this time puzzling about the relative merits of Freud and Adler: Freud with his view that all neurosis is sexual in origin, Adler with his belief that man’s life is a fight against the feeling of inferiority, and that his mainspring is his ‘will-to-power’. In the Bronx zoo, he was struck by the dominance behaviour of the monkeys and by the non-stop sex. He was puzzled that sexual behaviour seemed so indiscriminate: males mounted females or other males; females mounted other females and even males. There was also a distinct ‘pecking order’, the more dominant monkeys bullying the less dominant. There seemed to be as much evidence for Freud’s theory as for Adler’s. Then, one day, a revelation burst upon Maslow. Monkey sex looked indiscriminate because the more dominant monkeys mounted the less dominant ones, whether male or female. Maslow concluded, therefore, that Adler was right and Freud was wrong—about this matter at least.
Since dominance behaviour seemed to be the key to monkey psychology, Maslow wondered how far this applied to human beings. He decided to study dominance behaviour in human beings and, since he was a young and heterosexual male, decided that he would prefer to study women rather than men. Besides, he felt that women were usually more honest when it came to talking about their private lives. In 1936, he began a series of interviews with college women; his aim was to find out whether sex and dominance are related. He quickly concluded that they were.
The women tended to fall into three distinct groups: high-dominance, medium-dominance and low-dominance, the high-dominance group being the smallest of the three. High-dominance women tended to be promiscuous and to enjoy sex for its own sake—in a manner we tend to regard as distinctly masculine. They were more likely to masturbate, sleep with different men, and have lesbian experiences. Medium-dominance women were basically romantics; they might have a strong sex drive, but their sexual experience was usually limited. They were looking for ‘Mr Right’, the kind of man who would bring them flowers and take them out for dinner in restaurants with soft lights and sweet music. Low-dominance women seemed actively to dislike sex, or to think of it as an unfortunate necessity for producing children. One low-dominance woman with a high sex drive refused to permit her husband sexual intercourse because she disliked children. Low-dominance women tended to be prudes who were shocked at nudity and regarded the male sexual organ as disgusting. (High-dominance women thought it beautiful.)
Their choice of males was dictated by the dominance group. High-dominance women liked high-dominance males, the kind who would grab them and hurl them on a bed. They seemed to like their lovers to be athletic, rough and unsentimental. Medium-dominance women liked kindly, home-loving males, the kind who smoke a pipe and look calm and reflective. They would prefer a romantic male, but were prepared to settle for a hard worker of reliable habits. Low-dominance women were distrustful of all males, although they usually wanted children and recognized that a man had to be pressed into service for this purpose. They preferred the kind of gentle, shy man who would admire them from a distance for years without daring to speak.
But Maslow’s most interesting observation was that all the women, in all dominance groups, preferred a male who was slightly more dominant than themselves. One very high-dominance woman spent years looking for a man of superior dominance—meanwhile having many affairs; and once she found him, married him and lived happily ever after. However, she enjoyed picking fights with him, provoking him to violence that ended in virtual rape; and this sexual experience she found the most satisfying of all. Clearly, even this man was not quite dominant enough, and she was provoking him to an artificially high level of dominance.
The rule seemed to be that, for a permanent relationship, a man and woman needed to be in the same dominance group. Medium-dominance women were nervous of high-dominance males, and low-dominance women were terrified of medium-dominance males. As to the males, they might well show a sexual interest in a woman of a lower dominance group, but it would not survive the act of seduction. A medium-dominance woman might be superficially attracted by a high-dominance male; but on closer acquaintance she would find him brutal and unromantic. A high-dominance male might find a medium-dominance female ‘beddable’, but closer acquaintance would reveal her as rather uninteresting, like an unseasoned meal. To achieve a personal relationship, the two would need to be in the same dominance group. Maslow even devised psychological tests to discover whether the ‘dominance gap’ between a man and a woman was of the right size to form the basis of a permanent relationship.
It was some time after writing a book about Maslow (New Pathways in Psychology, published in 1972) that it dawned on me that this matter of the ‘dominance gap’ threw an interesting light on many cases of partnership in crime. The first case of the sort to arouse my curiosity was that of Albert T. Patrick, a scoundrelly New York lawyer who, in 1900, persuaded a manservant named Charles Jones to kill his employer with chloroform. Jones had been picked out of the gutter by his employer, a rich old man named William Rice, and had every reason to be grateful to him. Yet he quickly came under Patrick’s spell and took part in the plot to murder and defraud. The plot misfired; both were arrested. The police placed them in adjoining cells. Patrick handed Jones a knife saying ‘You cut your throat first and I’ll follow…’ Jones was so completely under Patrick’s domination that he did not even pause to wonder how Patrick would get the knife back. A gurgling noise alerted the police, who were able to foil the attempted suicide. Patrick was sentenced to death but was eventually pardoned and released.
How did Patrick achieve such domination? There was no sexual link between them, and he was not blackmailing Jones. But what becomes very clear from detailed accounts of the case is that Patrick was a man of extremely high dominance, while Jones was quite definitely of medium dominance. It was Patrick’s combination of charm and dominance that exerted such a spell.
It struck me that in many cases of duo-murder (partnership in murder), one of the partners is usually high-dominance and the other medium—as already noted, Loeb and Leopold even referred to themselves as ‘master and slave’. It is true that the Lonely Hearts murders—Fernandez and Beck—are slightly less simple: Fernandez was the dominant one of the pair, with his belief that he could hypnotize women and seduce them by magic; yet it was Martha who dragged him into murder. And in the Moors case, Myra’s chin alone reveals that she was a woman of fairly high dominance, so Brady’s claim that she took an active role in the murders sounds plausible. Yet it is still perfectly obvious that Brady was the dominant one, and that Myra was putty in his hands.
The simple truth seems to be that in most cases of folie à deux, neither partner would be capable of murder if it were not for the stimulus of the other. Some strange chemical reaction seems to occur, like a mixture of nitric acid and glycerine that makes nitroglycerine.
One of the most interesting examples of the syndrome was the Thurneman case, which occurred in Sweden in the 1930s. Dr Sigvard Thurneman was a psychiatrist—and a hypnotist—who saw himself as a kind of Professor Moriarty. Between 1930 and 1936, a series of robberies and murders occurred in the area of Sala, near Stockholm. A man named Eriksson was found shot in a frozen lake. A wealthy mining official named Kjellberg was found, together with his housekeeper, in his burnt home, shot in the head, and a safe full of wages had been forced. A woman named Blomqvist was found in her burnt home, her jewellery missing. But when, in June 1936, a quarryman carrying the payroll was murdered, an elderly man heard the shot, and saw an American car driving away.
Newspaper publicity led the thieves to panic and abandon the car by the roadside; it then became clear that its number plates had been altered by a professional. This man was tracked down in a routine investigation of garages, and implicated his employer, a man named Hedstrom. Hedstrom denied it, but as soon as the police left, rang a number in Stockholm—Dr Sigvard Thurneman. The police had tapped his phone, and went to call on Thurneman—a young man in his late twenties with a receding chin and a high forehead, not unlike the pictures of Moriarty. He flatly denied knowing anything about the crimes.
It was Hedstrom who decided to confess, when one of the murder guns was found in his garage. He and Thurneman had met at the University of Uppsala, where Thurneman had been fascinated by hypnosis and occultism. Thurneman had also spent a great deal of time planning ‘perfect crimes’. The first victim, Eriksson, had become one of Thurneman’s patients, and had been regularly hypnotized for nervous problems. He had agreed to take part in a robbery, but had changed his mind at the last moment; this is why he had been killed. A number of crimes—including the murders and several robberies—had then been committed by Hedstrom and other patients of Thurneman.
Faced with Hedstrom’s confession, Thurneman decided to tell everything. He even wrote an autobiography in prison, telling the whole incredible story of his domination of the gang by hypnosis. It might be used by Adlerian psychologists as a classic demonstration of the way that physical inferiority—Thurneman was a sickly and undersized child—can lead to over-compensation. Thurneman had studied yoga, then occultism, and finally become a cult leader. He seduced underage girls under hypnosis then disposed of them in the white slave trade. A bisexual, he caused one of his male lovers to commit suicide by hypnotic suggestion. He induced a deep trance in another gang member and injected a fatal dose of poison.
His aim was to become a millionaire and retire to South America, and at the time of his arrest he was planning to rob a Stockholm bank by blowing it open with a huge quantity of dynamite.
Thurneman and four accomplices were sentenced to life imprisonment, but Thurneman soon became unmistakably insane, and was transferred to a criminal lunatic asylum.
Here we have a very clear parallel with the Brady case—in some ways, Thurneman was what Brady might have hoped to become, if his career had not been cut short by David Smith’s decision to go to the police.
A curiously similar case took place in Copenhagen in 1951, when a man named Palle Hardrup killed two bank officials in the course of an unsuccessful hold-up. The police were tipped off that the real killer was a man named Bjorn Nielsen, who had absolute and total control of Hardrup, whom he had met in prison. Faced with Nielsen in the police interrogation room, Hardrup seemed to go into a trance, in which he insisted that Nielsen had nothing to do with the crime. But a policeman noticed that Nielsen was holding up two crossed fingers. Hardrup’s wife also stated that Nielsen had gained total ascendancy over her husband, and that he had done this through hypnosis. She told how Nielsen had stripped her and flogged her with a leather belt, while her normally admiring husband looked on.
In police custody, Hardrup periodically improved—until he received a letter from Nielsen signed with an X, at which he would revert to his trance-like insistence that he alone was guilty. A police psychiatrist was able to establish that Hardrup had been hypnotically conditioned to go into a trance when he saw an X.
Finally, kept away from Nielsen—and Xs—Hardrup suddenly demanded paper, and wrote a confession describing how Nielsen had become his ‘master’ through hypnosis, and now, under Nielsen’s orders, he had committed an earlier robbery and handed Nielsen the complete proceeds—£5,000. The police were able to establish that this had been paid into Nielsen’s bank the day after the robbery.
In court, with Nielsen’s blazing eyes fixed upon him, Hardrup withdrew his confession, but the jury—who had noted this change of demeanour—decided that Nielsen was the real culprit, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Hardrup was placed in a psychiatric hospital.
In these two cases involving hypnosis, we seem to be in the presence of the archetypal criminal daydream: to be able to commit crime by proxy, and to have complete control of the human robot who is the instrument of the super-criminal. The assumption that underlies the daydream is expressed by Harry Lime, in Graham Greene’s The Third Man, in the scene on the Big Wheel in Vienna. When the hero reproaches him with selling adulterated life-saving drugs that actually cause death, Lime points to the people ‘moving like black flies’ on the ground, and asks: ‘Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving for ever? If I said you can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really tell me to keep my money?’ Sade’s argument is basically identical: human beings are fundamentally selfish. We cannot feel love—or even interest—towards people we have never met. So why pretend that all men are brothers? Why not accept the truth: that we all care for ‘number one’, and only care for others in so far as it suits us?
There is an obvious element of truth in this, or someone as intelligent as Sade—or Brady—would not have been taken in by it. But it misses the essential point. Self-actualization is basically about the control of consciousness. It brings a curious sense of power over oneself, and an awareness of the immense meaningfulness of the external world. Such moments bring the recognition that our usual notions about consciousness are based on a misconception: upon the notion that consciousness proceeds automatically, like a television picture, and that the ‘you’ that watches it is essentially passive. Moments of intensity—and even the sexual orgasm must be included—make us aware that we are ‘in control’: that we can alter the brightness, the colour, even the speed at which it moves. We are affected by great music, great poetry, great art, because the artist has somehow learned the trick of inducing these moods of intensity and control. It is as if he has changed a black-and-white picture on television into colour.
Now, as Sade noted, there are other ways of achieving this sense of control. One of them is sex. Another is manipulating other people. Even eating and drinking can bring this sensation of heightened control. (It is significant that when Sade was confined to the lunatic asylum, he overate until he became enormous.) When human beings have discovered some method of inducing the feeling, they tend to repeat it over and over again, like a laboratory rat pushing at the lever that releases its food. This is obviously the key to sex crime—it involves a feeling of power, followed by a feeling of peace. This is the reason that politicians cling so obsessively to power. This is the reason that actors love to feel their power over an audience. This is the reason that juvenile delinquents steal cars and drive at ninety miles an hour. All these are simply attempts to achieve that sense of power and control that is achieved far more fully in the moment of self-actualization. And the moment of self-actualization makes all the short-cuts seem irrelevant—in fact, absurd and unnecessary.
The problem is that, as a method of self-actualization, crime is counterproductive. Self-actualization brings a sense of fullness, of relaxation, of harmony, in which past brutalities and stupidities are seen simply as shameful mistakes that demand an apology. Therefore, the basic law of moral common sense is never to do anything that will block your evolution, just as it is physical common sense not to ruin your health for the sake of some temporary pleasure. Sex killers like Rees, Brady and—as we shall see—Bundy have reached a conscious decision that their personal evolution demands certain ‘forbidden’ pleasures. They also believe, like Ibsen’s Norah in A Doll’s House, that personal evolution is so important that all rival demands can be ignored with a good conscience. From the psychological point of view, what is interesting about this decision is that it bears a generic resemblance to the decision often taken by men of genius in their youth—that self-development involves ignoring the demands of family and society, and pursuing the path of the ‘loner’. Such loners usually justify themselves by pointing to other loners who have finally ‘succeeded’ by ignoring the demands of society (Nietzsche’s ‘herd’)—from saints and yogis to drunken painters and self-destructive poets. What they fail to grasp is the law of compensation by which violence towards others is oddly counterproductive. In practice, as we can see in case after case of serial murder, it amounts to violence towards oneself. This is the real objection to crime: not a religious or moral objection, but a psychological one: it is a process of self-destruction.
One of the most sensational unsolved cases of the 1960s might serve as an illustration of this peculiar mechanism.
Between February 1964 and January 1965, the bodies of six women—mostly prostitutes—were found in areas not far from the Thames. The first of the bodies, that of a 30-year-old prostitute named Hanna Tailford, was found in the water near Hammersmith bridge. She was naked except for her stockings, and her panties had been stuffed into her mouth. Her jaw was bruised, but this could have resulted from a fall. On 18 April, the naked body of Irene Lockwood, a 26-year-old prostitute, was found at Duke’s Meadows, near Barnes Bridge, not far from the place where Hanna Tailford had been found. She had been strangled, and, like Hanna Tailford, she had been pregnant. A 54-year-old Kensington caretaker, Kenneth Archibald, confessed to her murder, and he seemed to know a great deal about the girl; but at his trial, it was established that his confession was false, and he was acquitted. There was another reason for believing in his innocence; while he was still in custody, another naked girl was found in an alleyway at Osterley Park, Brentford. This was only three weeks after the discovery of Irene Lockwood’s body. The dead girl—the only one among the victims who could be described as pretty—was identified as a 22-year-old prostitute and striptease artist, Helen Barthelemy. There were a number of curious features in the case. A line around her waist showed that her panties had been removed after death, and there was no evidence of normal sexual assault. But four of her front teeth were missing. Oddly enough, the teeth had not been knocked out by a blow, but deliberately forced out; a piece of one of them was found lodged in her throat. Medical investigation also revealed the presence of male sperm in her throat. Here, then, was the cause of death; she had been choked by a penis, probably in the course of performing an act of fellatio. The missing teeth suggested that the killer had repeated the assault after death. It was established that she had disappeared some days before her body was found. Where, then, had her body been kept? Flakes of paint found on her skin suggested the answer, for it was the type of paint used in spraying cars. Clearly, the body had been kept somewhere near a car spraying plant, but in some place where it was not likely to be discovered by the workers.
The ‘nude murders’ became a public sensation, for it now seemed likely that they were the work of one man. Enormous numbers of police were deployed in the search for the spray-shop, and in an attempt to keep a closer watch on the areas in which the three victims had been picked up—around Notting Hill and Shepherds Bush. Perhaps for this reason, the killer decided to take no risks for several months.
The body of the fourth victim—Mary Fleming, aged 30—found on 14 July, confirmed that the same man was probably responsible for all four murders. Her false teeth were missing; there was sperm in her throat; and her skin showed traces of the same spray paint. She had vanished three days earlier.
Her body was found, in a half-crouching position, near a garage in Acton, and the van was actually seen leaving the scene of the crime. A motorist driving past Berrymede Road, a cul-de-sac, at 5.30 in the morning, had to brake violently to avoid a van that shot out in front of him. He was so angry that he contacted the police to report the incident. If he had made a note of the van number, the nude case would have been solved. A squad car that arrived a few minutes later found the body of Mary Fleming in the forecourt of a garage in the cul-de-sac.
The near-miss probably alarmed the killer, for no more murders occurred that summer. Then, on 25 November 1964, another naked body was found under some debris on a car park at Hornton Street, Kensington. She was identified as Margaret McGowan, 21, a Scot. Under the name Frances Brown, she had been called as a witness in the trial of Stephen Ward, and Ludovic Kennedy described her (in his book on the trial) as a small, bird-like woman with a pale face and fringe. Margaret McGowan had disappeared more than a month before her body was found, and there were signs of decomposition. Again, there were traces of paint, and a missing front tooth indicated that she had died in the same way as the previous two victims.
The last of the stripper’s victims was a prostitute named Bridie O’Hara, 28. She was found on 16 February 1965, in some undergrowth on the Heron Trading Estate, in Acton. She had last been seen on 11 January in the Shepherds Bush Hotel. The body was partly mummified, which indicated that it had been kept in a cool place. As usual, teeth were missing, and sperm was found in the throat. Fingermarks on the back of her neck revealed that, like the other victims, she had died in a kneeling position, bent over the killer’s lap.
Detective Chief Superintendent John du Rose was recalled from his holiday to take charge of the investigation in the Shepherds Bush area. The Heron Trading Estate provided the lead they had been waiting for. Investigation of a paint spray shop revealed that this was definitely the source of the paint found on the bodies—chemical analysis proved it. The proximity of a disused warehouse solved the question of where the bodies had lain before they were dumped. The powerful spray guns caused the paint to carry, with diminishing intensity, for several hundred yards. Analysis of paint on the bodies enabled experts to establish the spot where the women must have been concealed: it was underneath a transformer in the warehouse.
Yet even with this discovery, the case was far from solved. Thousands of men worked on the Heron Trading Estate. (Oddly enough Christie had been employed there.) Mass questioning seemed to bring the police no closer to their suspect. Du Rose decided to throw an immense twenty-mile cordon around the area, to keep a careful check on all cars passing through at night. Drivers who were observed more than once were noted; if they were seen more than twice, they were interviewed. Du Rose conducted what he called ‘a war of nerves’ against the killer, dropping hints in the press or on television that indicated the police were getting closer. They knew he drove a van; they knew he must have right of access to the trading estate by night. The size of the victims—who were all short women—suggested that the killer was under middle height. As the months passed, and no further murders took place, du Rose assumed that he was winning the war of nerves. The killer had ceased to operate. He checked on all men who had been jailed since mid-February, all men with prison records who had been hospitalized, all men who had died or committed suicide. In his book Murder Was My Business, du Rose claims that a list of twenty suspects had been reduced to three when one of the three committed suicide. He left a note saying that he could not bear the strain any longer. The man was a security guard who drove a van, and had access to the estate. At the time when the women were murdered, his rounds included the spray shop. He worked by night, from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. He was unmarried.
Another serial killer of the 1960s provides an interesting—and virtually unique—illustration of the same mechanism.
Between June 1962 and January 1964 the city of Boston, Massachusetts was terrorized by a series of murders that achieved worldwide publicity. The unknown killer, who strangled and sexually abused his victims, became known as the Boston Strangler. The first six victims were elderly women, whose ages ranged from 55 to 85.
On 4 June 1962 55-year-old Anna Slesers was found in her apartment in the Back Bay area of Boston. She had been knocked unconscious with a blunt instrument—later determined to be a lead weight—and then strangled. The body, clad only in an open housecoat, was lying on its back with the legs apart. No semen was found in the vagina, but she had evidently been sexually assaulted with some hard object such as a soda bottle. The apartment had been ransacked.
Two weeks later on 30 June, 68-year-old Nina Nichols failed to call back a friend after a telephone conversation had been interrupted by a ring at the doorbell. The friend asked the janitor to check her apartment. Nina Nichols was lying on the bedroom floor, strangled with a stocking, her legs open in a rape position. Her killer had also bitten her. Medical examination revealed that she had been sexually assaulted with a wine bottle after death. There was semen on her thighs, but not in the vagina.
Two days later, on Monday 2 July, neighbours of a 65-year-old retired nurse named Helen Blake, who lived in Lynn, north of Boston, became anxious at not having seen her for two days, and sent for the police. Helen Blake was lying face downwards on her bed, a stocking knotted around her throat. Again, there was dried semen on her thighs but not in the vagina. Mrs Blake had apparently been killed on the previous Saturday, the same day as Nina Nichols.
On 21 August Mrs Ida Irga, 75, was found dead in her apartment. Death was due to manual strangulation, after which a pillow case had been tied round her neck. She had been sexually assaulted with some hard object, and bitten. It was estimated that she had been dead for two days.
The last of the elderly victims was 67-year-old Jane Sullivan, another nurse. She was found in a kneeling position in the bathtub, her face in six inches of water. She was a powerful Irishwoman, and had evidently put up a tremendous fight—her assailant must have been very strong to overpower her. Two stockings were knotted around her neck. She had been killed on the day after Ida Irga, but the body was not found for more than a week; consequently it was impossible to determine whether she had been raped, but she had been sexually assaulted with a broom handle.
Boston was in a state of hysteria, but as weeks went by without further stranglings, it slowly subsided. A hot summer was succeeded by a very cold winter. In the early evening of 5 December 1962 two girls rang the doorbell of the apartment they shared with a 20-year-old black girl, Sophie Cark, and were surprised when she failed to answer. They let themselves in, and found Sophie lying on the floor; she was naked and in the rape position. She had been strangled with nylon stockings knotted round her neck. Medical examination established that she had been raped, and a semen stain on the carpet beside die body indicated that her killer had later masturbated over her. This was the first case in which rape was unquestionably established, and it led to the speculation that her killer was a second Boston Strangler, one who preferred young girls.
Three weeks later, on the last day of 1962, a businessman stopped his car outside the apartment of his secretary at 515 Park Drive and blew his horn. When she failed to come down, he assumed that she had already left, but when he found that she was not at the office, he rang the superintendent of her apartment building to ask him to check on her apartment. Patricia Bissette, 23, was lying in bed, covered with the bedclothes. She had been strangled with stockings, and medical examination established that she had been raped.
On 18 February 1963 a German girl named Gertrude Gruen survived an attack by the Strangler. A powerfully built man with a beaky nose, about five feet eight inches tall, knocked on her door and told her he had been sent to do work in her apartment. She was suffering from a virus, and only allowed him in after some argument. The man removed his coat and told her that she was pretty enough to be a model. Then he told her she had dust on the back of her dressing gown; she turned, and he hooked a powerful arm round her neck. She fought frantically, and sank her teeth into his hand until they bit to the bone. The man pushed her away, and as she began to scream, he ran out of the apartment.
The police were excited when the girl reported the attack—and then frustrated when they discovered that the shock had wiped all traces of the Strangler’s face from her memory.
A month later, on 9 March 1963, the Strangler killed another elderly victim. Sixty-nine-year-old Mrs Mary Brown lived in Lawrence, an industrial town twenty-five miles from Boston. The fact that her breasts had been exposed and a fork stuck in one of them should have suggested that she had been murdered by the ‘Phantom’ (as the press had now labelled the killer). However, because her skull had been beaten to a pulp with a piece of brass piping, she was not recognized as a Strangler victim—it was assumed that she had disturbed a burglar. In fact, she had been manually throttled.
The next victim was also nontypical. On 9 May 1963 a friend of 23-year-old graduate student Beverly Sams was puzzled when she failed to answer the telephone, and borrowed a key from the building supervisor. Beverly had been stabbed in the throat, and a stocking knotted around her neck. She was naked, and her legs spreadeagled and tied to the bed supports. Medical examination revealed that she had been raped.
Four months later, on 8 September, friends of 58-year-old divorcee, Evelyn Corbin, wondered why she failed to keep a lunch appointment and let themselves into her flat. Evelyn Corbin was lying almost naked on the bed, nylon stockings knotted around her throat and her panties rammed into her mouth. There was semen in her vagina and in her mouth.
On 23 November 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated, the Strangler killed his next victim in Lawrence. She was Joanne Graff, a Sunday school teacher. She had been strangled with stockings and raped.
The final victim was strangled on 4 January 1964. She was 19-year-old Mary Sullivan, who was found by room-mates when they came back from work. She was sitting on the bed, her buttocks on the pillow, her back against the headboard. Her knees had been parted, and a broom handle inserted into her vagina. Semen was running from the corner of her mouth. A card saying ‘Happy New Year’ had been propped against her foot. The killer had placed her body in a position where it would be seen as soon as anyone opened the door.
The murders ceased; but a rapist who became known as The Green Man—because he wore green clothes—began operating over a wide area that included Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. On one occasion he raped four women in a single day. He gained entrance to the apartment—sometimes forcing the lock with a strip of plastic—and often threatened the victim with a knife. When she was stripped, he would caress her with his hands and mouth; then, if he judged she wanted him to, he ‘raped’ her. (He was later to insist that the ‘Green Man’ had never raped an unwilling woman.) He was never physically violent, and had even been known to apologize before he left.
On the morning of 27 October 1964 a young married woman was dozing in bed after her husband had gone to work when a man entered the bedroom. He was dressed in green trousers, a green shirt, and wore green sunglasses, and he insisted that he was a detective. After seizing her by the throat he threatened her with a knife. He tore off her nightclothes, stuffed a pair of panties into her mouth, and tied her wrists and ankles to the bedposts. Then he kissed and bit her from head to foot, finally ejaculating on her stomach. His sexual appetite was obviously enormous; he continued to abuse her sexually for a great deal longer before he seemed satisfied. Then, after apologizing, he left. The girl called the police immediately, and went on to describe her assailant in such detail that a police artist was able to make a sketch of his face. As one of the detectives was studying it, he commented: ‘This looks like the Measuring Man.’ The ‘Measuring Man’ had been a harmless crank named Albert DeSalvo, who had been arrested in 1960 for talking his way into girls’ apartments claiming to represent a modelling agency. If the girl indicated that she might be interested in modelling, he would take her measurements with a tape measure. After that he would thank her politely and leave. The aspiring model would never hear from him again, and it was this that made some of them so indignant that they reported him. The police were baffled, since there seemed to be no obvious motive—although some girls admitted that they had allowed him to raise their skirts to measure from the hip to the knee. On a few occasions, he had allowed himself an intimate caress; but if the girl protested, he immediately apologized. One girl, as he crouched with his hand on her panties, had said: ‘I’d better get these clothes off or you won’t get the right measurements,’ and stripped. On this occasion, as on a number of others, the ‘Measuring Man’ had ended up in bed with the girl.
On 17 March 1960 a police patrol that had been set up to trap the ‘Measuring Man’ saw a man acting suspiciously in a backyard in Cambridge, Mass., and arrested him. Girls identified him as the ‘Measuring Man’, and he finally admitted it—claiming that he did it as a kind of lark, in order to make himself feel superior to college-educated girls. In May 1961 DeSalvo was sentenced to serve two years in the Middlesex County House of Correction. He served eleven months before being released. He had told a probation officer that he thought there was something wrong with him—that he seemed to be wildly oversexed, so that he needed intercourse six or more times a day. No one suggested that he needed to see a psychiatrist.
Albert DeSalvo had clearly graduated from caressing girls as he measured them to rape. He was arrested on 5 November 1964 and identified by some of his victims. On 4 February 1965 he was committed to the Bridgewater State Hospital, a mental institution in Massachusetts.
Bridgewater had—and still has—many sexual psychopaths in residence, and many spoke freely about their exploits, particularly in the group therapy sessions. Albert DeSalvo was not reticent about his own sexual prowess, which was apparently considerable. He described how, in the summer of 1948, when he was 17, he had worked as a dishwasher in a Cape Cod motel, and spent much time swimming and sunbathing on the beach. There were many college girls there, and they found the powerfully built youth attractive. Word of DeSalvo’s amazing sexual prowess soon spread. ‘They would even come up to the motel sometimes looking for me and some nights we would spend the whole night doing it down on the beach, stopping for a while, then doing it again…’
Possibly because he encountered a certain scepticism—he had a reputation as a boaster—DeSalvo began hinting that he had done far more serious things than raping a few women. Only one of his ward-mates took him seriously: a murderer called George Nassar. At first, Nassar also thought DeSalvo was merely boasting—particularly when he confided that he was the Boston Strangler. What finally convinced him was DeSalvo’s detailed knowledge of the crimes. ‘He knows more about them stranglings than the cops.’
Nassar knew there was a large reward for the Boston Strangler, and he spoke to his attorney, F. Lee Bailey, who had achieved fame when he obtained freedom for Dr Sam Sheppard, accused of murdering his wife. Bailey was also sceptical—there are endless fake confessions to almost every widely publicized murder—but when he went to see DeSalvo on 4 March 1965, he soon realized that this sounded authentic. DeSalvo was not a man of high intelligence—although bright and articulate—and it seemed unlikely that he could have read and memorized newspaper accounts of the murders. He even mentioned a murder that no one knew about—an old lady of 80 or so who had died of a heart attack as he grabbed her. In fact, DeSalvo’s account enabled the police to identify her as 85-year-old Mary Mullens who had been found dead in her Boston apartment two weeks after the murder of Anna Slesers, the first Strangler victim. DeSalvo’s descriptions of other murder scenes made it clear that he knew details that had never been published. Most important of all, he knew exactly what the Strangler had done to various victims. This information had been deliberately suppressed, giving rise to all kind of wild rumours of torture and perversion. DeSalvo knew, for example, precisely what position Mary Sullivan—the last victim—had been left in, and that she had a broom handle inserted into her vagina; and he was able to describe in precise detail the rooms of most of the victims.
There were some odd complications. Several witnesses who had seen a man entering apartment buildings where stranglings had taken place failed to identify DeSalvo as the man. And two women who had seen the Strangler—including Gertrude Gruen, the German girl who had fought him off—not only failed to identify DeSalvo, but identified George Nassar as the strangler. Yet DeSalvo’s incredibly detailed knowledge of the crimes finally convinced most of those involved with the case that he alone was the Boston Strangler.
In the long run, all this proved irrelevant. Albert DeSalvo stood trial for the Green Man rapes, and in 1967 was sentenced to permanent detention in the Walpole State Prison, where he could receive psychiatric treatment. On 26 November 1973 DeSalvo was found dead in his cell, stabbed through the heart. No motive was ever established, and whoever was responsible was never caught.
In January 1964, while the Boston Strangler was still at large, the assistant attorney-general of Massachusetts, John S. Bottomly, decided to set up a committee of psychiatrists to attempt to establish some kind of ‘psychological profile’ of the killer. One of the psychiatrists who served on that committee was Dr James A. Brussel, the man who had been so successful in describing New York’s ‘Mad Bomber’. When he attended his first meeting, Brussel discovered that there was a sharp division of opinion within the committee. One group believed that there were two stranglers, one of whom killed old women, and the other young girls; the other group thought there was only one strangler.
It was at his second meeting of the committee—in April 1965—that Brussel was hit by a sudden ‘hunch’ as he listened to a psychiatrist pointing out that in some cases, semen was found in the vagina, while in others it was found on the breasts, thighs, or even on the carpet. When it came to his turn to speak, Brussel outlined the theory that had suddenly come to him ‘in a flash’.
‘I think we’re dealing with one man. The apparent differences in M.O., I believe, result from changes that have been going on in this man. Over the two-year period during which he has been committing these murders, he had gone through a series of upheavals…’
The first five victims, said Brussel, were elderly women, and there was no semen in the vaginas. They had been manipulated in other ways—‘a type of sexual molestation that might be expected of a small boy, not a man’. A boy gets over his sexual obsession with his mother, and transfers his interest to girls of his own age. ‘The Strangler…achieved this transfer—achieved emotional puberty—in a matter of months.’ Now he wanted to achieve orgasm inside younger women. And with the final victim, Mary Sullivan, the semen was in her mouth and over her breasts; a broom had been inserted in the vagina. The Strangler was making a gesture of triumph and of defiance: ‘I throw my sex in your face.’
This man, said Brussel, was a physically powerful individual, probably in his late twenties or early thirties, the time the paranoid reaction reaches its peak. He hazarded a guess that the Strangler’s nationality was Italian or Spanish, since garrotting is a method used by bandits in both countries.
Brussel’s final ‘guesses’ were startlingly to the point. He believed that the Strangler had stopped killing because he had worked it out of his system. He had, in effect, grown up. And he would finally be caught because he would be unable to resist talking about his crimes and his new-found maturity.
The rest of the committee was polite but sceptical. But one year later, Brussel was proved correct when DeSalvo began admitting to George Nassar that he was the Boston Strangler.
In 1966, Brussel went to Boston to interview DeSalvo. He had been half-expecting a misshapen monster, and was surprised to be greeted by a good-looking, polite young man with a magnificent head of dark hair. (Brussel had even foretold that the Strangler would have well-tended hair, since he was obsessed by the impression he made on women.) Brussel found him charming, and soon realized how DeSalvo had talked his way into so many apartments; he seemed a thoroughly nice young man. Then what had turned him into a murderer? As usual, it proved to be the family and childhood background. DeSalvo’s father was the worst kind of brute. He beat his wife and children mercilessly—on one occasion he broke his wife’s fingers one by one. He beat one son with a hosepipe so badly—for knocking over a box of fruit—that the boy was not allowed on the beach all summer because he was covered in black and yellow bruises. He often brought a prostitute home and had sex with her in front of the children. Their mother was also less than satisfactory. She was indifferent and self-preoccupied, and had no time for the children. As a child Albert had been a ‘loner’, his only real friend a dog that lived in a junkyard. He developed sadistic compulsions at an early age. He and a playmate called Billy used to place a dog and cat in two compartments of an orange crate and starve them for days, then pull out the partition, and watch as the cat scratched out the dog’s eyes. But, like so many psychopaths (Albert Fish and Gary Heidnik, for example) he could display considerable charm and make himself liked.
The real key to DeSalvo was sex. From an early age he was insatiable, ‘walking around with a rail on most of the time, ready to take on any broad or fag come along, or to watch some broad and masturbate…thinking about sex a lot, more than anything, and needing it so much all the time. If only somebody could’ve seen it then and told me it was not normal, even sick…’ DeSalvo is here exaggerating; a large proportion of healthy young males go around in much the same state. DeSalvo’s environment offered a great deal of sexual stimulus. He participated in sex games with his brothers and sisters when he was 5 or 6 years old. At the age of 8 he performed oral sex on a girl at school, and was soon persuading girls to do the same for him. Albert DeSalvo was turned into a sexual psychopath by the same kind of ‘hothouse environment’ that had nurtured Albert Fish. Combined with the lack of moral restraint that resulted from his family background, his tremendous sex urge soon led him to rape—his own estimation was that he had raped or assaulted almost two thousand women. During the course of the Green Man attacks, he raped four women in a single day, and even then tried to pick up a fifth. This was something that Brussel had failed to recognize. The Strangler had not been ‘searching for his potency’—he had always been potent. During his teens, a woman neighbour had asked him if it was true that he had a permanent erection, and when he modestly admitted it, invited him into her apartment. ‘She went down on her knees and blowed me and I come almost right off and she said: “Oh, now you went and come and what am I going to have to get screwed with?”, and I said: “Don’t worry, I’ll have a hard on again in a few minutes”.’ When he left her, she was exhausted, but he was still unsatisfied. It was not potency DeSalvo was searching for, but emotional stability.
Yet Brussel was undoubtedly correct about the main thing: that DeSalvo’s murders were part of an attempt to grow up. The murders of elderly women were acts of revenge against the mother who had rejected him; but the murder of the young black girl Sophie Clark signalled a change. When he knocked on her door DeSalvo had no idea that she would be so young—he was looking for elderly women, like his mother. Her white dress and black stockings excited him. He talked his way into her apartment by claiming to be a workman sent to carry out repairs—the method he invariably used—then, when she turned her back, hooked his arm round her neck and squeezed until she was unconscious. After that he raped her, then strangled her. The experience taught him that he preferred young girls to older women, and caused the change in his method.
Yet from the beginning, DeSalvo suffered from the same problem as so many sex killers: self-division. A month before he killed Anna Slesers—the first victim—DeSalvo talked his way into the apartment of an attractive Swedish girl, claiming that he had been sent to repair the ceiling. ‘She was laughing and she was very nice. An attractive, kind woman.’ In the bathroom she turned her back on him, and DeSalvo hooked his powerful forearm round her neck. As he began to squeeze, he saw her face in the bathroom mirror, ‘the look of awful fear and pain.’ ‘And I see myself, the look on my own face…and I can’t do it. I take my arm away.’ The girl asked him what he was going to do, and he admitted that he was going to rape her and possibly kill her. ‘I tell you now that I was ashamed—I began to cry.’ He fell on his knees in front of her and said: ‘Oh God, what was I doing? I am a good Catholic man with a wife and children. I don’t know what to do…Please call the police.’ The girl told him to go home. ‘She was a kind person and she was trying to be good to me. But how much better it would have been if she had called the police right then and there.’ The episode is an interesting confirmation of a theory advanced by Brussel to his fellow committee members: that the Strangler only attacked women who turned their backs on him, because it seemed a form of ‘rejection’.
After killing Sophie Clark, he came very close to sparing his next victim, Patricia Bissette. ‘She was very nice to me, she treated me like a man—I thought of doing it to her and I talked myself out of it.’ She offered him coffee, and when he offered to go out and get some doughnuts, told him she had food there. ‘Then it was as good as over. I didn’t want it to happen but then I knew that it would.’ After he had throttled her into unconsciousness and was raping her, ‘I want to say that all the time I was doing this, I was thinking about how nice she had been to me and it was making me feel bad. She had treated me right, and I was doing this thing to her…’
At other times, Mr Hyde took over—as in his next murder, that of Mary Brown in Lawrence. This murder was not, at the time, recognized as one of the Strangler’s crimes, because its ferocity seemed untypical. DeSalvo described how he had knocked on the door and explained to the grey-haired lady who answered that he had come to paint the kitchen. She let him in without question. In his pocket, DeSalvo had a piece of brass pipe that he had found in the hallway. ‘As she walked to the kitchen, her back was to me. I hit her right on the back of the head with the pipe…this was terrible, and I don’t like talking about it. She went down and I ripped her things open, showing her busts…she was unconscious and bleeding…I don’t know why but then I hit her again on the head with the pipe. I kept on hitting and hitting her with the pipe…this is like out of this world…this is unbelievable…oh, it was terrible…because her head felt like it was all gone…terrible…then I took this fork and stuck it into her right bust.’ As in so many other cases, DeSalvo was unable to say why he did it. (Similarly, he had been unable to explain why he rifled the apartments after committing the murders: he was not looking for anything specific and apparently took nothing.) What he failed to recognize was that, like so many other serial killers, he had been taken over—literally possessed—by a sadistic compulsion, the sheer joy of destruction. Yet even as he did it, he continued to feel ‘This is terrible.’
DeSalvo never succeeded in overcoming his feeling of guilt. He intimidated the tenth victim, 23-year-old Beverly Sams, with a knife; she made him promise not to rape her, because she was afraid of pregnancy. When he had her lying on the bed, DeSalvo decided to gag her. ‘Then I thought that I wouldn’t want a broad like that, with her stupid ideas to see me, so I tied a blindfold over her eyes.’ When she recovered consciousness and discovered that he was raping her, she called him an animal. This enraged him enough to make him stab her. When he could kill like this—giving rein to his resentment—he experienced no guilt.
The last victim, Mary Sullivan, tried to reason with him, to talk him out of rape. Her words struck home. ‘I recall thinking at the time, yes, she is right, I don’t have to do these things any more now…I heard what this girl is saying and it stayed with me.’ At the time he was angry, and hit her several times. As he tied her up and prepared to rape her, he realized ‘I would never be able to do it again’. After raping her, he strangled her manually, while she struggled to get up. ‘This is what I don’t like to talk about. This is killing me even to talk about.’ After death, her face looked ‘surprised and even disappointed with the way I had treated her’. Then DeSalvo propped her up against the head of the bed, straddled her chest, and masturbated so that the sperm would strike her face. ‘She is sitting there with the stuff on her nose and mouth and chin. I am not in control of myself. I know that something awful has been done, that the whole world of human beings are shocked and will be even more shocked.’ He went into the kitchen and fetched a broom, then inserted it into her vagina, ‘not so far as to hurt her…you say it is funny that I worry about hurting her when she is already dead, but that is the truth…I do not want to hurt her’. And, after leaving the apartment; ‘as far as I was concerned it wasn’t me: I can’t explain it to you any other way.’ When Brussel later pressed him to explain why Mary Sullivan was his final victim, he admitted that she had reminded him of his daughter: Dr Jekyll was back in control.
That he would now remain in control was demonstrated in a sensational manner. In February 1967, a month after being sentenced to life imprisonment, DeSalvo and two more inmates escaped from the Bridgewater mental institution. The city of Boston was plunged into panic. Interviewed by the press, Brussel was unconcerned. He pointed out that DeSalvo had left a note behind, apologizing for taking unauthorized leave, and explaining that he was only doing so to draw attention to the fact that he was receiving no psychiatric treatment. He promised that he would harm nobody. Brussel stated that he was sure DeSalvo would honour his promise. In fact, DeSalvo gave himself up after only thirty-six hours. His protest failed in its purpose—he was transferred to the virtually escape-proof Walpole Prison, but still failed to receive any psychiatric treatment.
At least Brussel had proved his point. The Boston Strangler had raped and murdered his way to a kind of maturity.
While the Boston Strangler was still at large, an unusual case of serial sex murder was taking place behind the Iron Curtain.
In July 1964, the communist regime in Poland was getting prepared to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the liberation of Warsaw by Russian troops; a great parade was due to take place in Warsaw on the 22nd. On 4 July the editor of Przeglad Polityczny, the Polish equivalent of Pravda, received an anonymous letter in spidery red handwriting: ‘There is no happiness without tears, no life without death. Beware! I am going to make you cry.’ Marian Starzynski thought the anonymous writer had him in mind, and requested police protection. But on the day of the big parade, a 17-year-old blonde, Danka Maciejowitz, failed to arrive home from a parade organized by the School of Choreography and Folklore in Olsztyn, one hundred and sixty miles north of Warsaw. The next day, a gardener in the Olsztyn Park of Polish Heroes discovered the girl’s body in some shrubbery. She had been stripped naked and raped, and the lower part of her body was covered with Jack-the-Ripper-type mutilations. And the following day, the 24th, another red-ink letter was delivered to Kulisy, a Warsaw newspaper: ‘I picked a juicy flower in Olsztyn and I shall do it again somewhere else, for there is no holiday without a funeral.’ Analysis of the ink showed that it had been made by dissolving red art paint in turpentine.
On 16 January 1965, the Warsaw newspaper Zycie Warsawy published the picture of a pretty 16-year-old girl, Aniuta Kaliniak, who had been chosen to lead a parade of students in another celebration rally the following day. She left her home in Praga, an eastern suburb of Warsaw, and crossed the river Vistula to reach the parade. Later, she thumbed a lift from a lorry driver, who dropped her close to her home at a crossroads. (The fact that a 16-year-old girl would thumb a lift like this indicates that the level of sex crime in Poland must be a great deal lower than in England or the US.) The day after the parade, her body was found in a basement in a leather factory opposite her home. The killer had removed a grating to get in. The crime had obviously been carefully planned. He had waited in the shadows of the wall, and cut off her cry with a wire noose dropped over her head. In the basement, he had raped her, and left a six-inch spike sticking in her sexual organs (an echo of the Boston Strangler). While the search went on another red-ink letter advised the police where to look for her body.
Olsztyn and Warsaw are one hundred and sixty miles apart; this modern Ripper differed from his predecessor in not sticking to the same area. Moreover, he was a man with a strong dramatic sense: the selection of national holidays for his crimes, the letters philosophizing about life and death.
The Red Spider—as he had come to be known, from his spidery writing—chose All Saints’ Day, 1 November, for his next murder, and Poznan, two hundred kilometres west of Warsaw, as the site. A young, blonde hotel receptionist, Janka Popielski, was on her way to look for a lift to a nearby village, where she meant to meet her boyfriend. Since it was her holiday, the freight terminal was almost deserted. Her killer pressed a chloroform-soaked bandage over her nose and mouth. Then he removed her skirt, stockings and panties, and raped her behind a packing shed. After this, he killed her with a screwdriver. The mutilations were so thorough and revolting that the authorities suppressed all details. The Red Spider differed from many sex killers in apparently being totally uninterested in the upper half of his victims. Janka was stuffed into a packing case, where she was discovered an hour later. The police swooped on all trains and buses leaving Poznan, looking for a man with bloodstained clothes; but they failed to find one. The next day, the Poznan newspaper Courier Zachodni received one of the now-notorious letters in red ink, containing a quotation from Stefan Zeromsky’s national epic Popioly (1928): ‘Only tears of sorrow can wash out the stain of shame; only pangs of suffering can blot out the fires of lust.’
May Day, 1966, was both a communist and a national holiday. Marysia Galazka, 17, went out to look for her cat in the quiet suburb of Zoliborz, in northern Warsaw. When she did not return, her father went out to look for her. He found her lying in the typical rape position, with her entrails forming an abstract pattern over her thighs, in a tool shed behind the house. Medical evidence revealed that the killer had raped her before disembowelling her.
Major Ciznek, of the Warsaw Homicide Squad, was in charge of the case, and he made a series of deductions. The first was that the Red Spider was unlikely to confine himself to his well-publicized murders on national holidays. Such killers seek victims when their sexual desire is at maximum tension, not according to some preconceived timetable. Ciznek examined evidence of some fourteen other murders that had taken place since the first one in April 1964, one each in Lublin, Radom, Kielce, Lodz, Bialystock, Lomza, two in Bydgoszcz, five in the Poznan district. All places were easily reached by railway; the modus operandi was always the same. Every major district of Poland within four hundred kilometres of Warsaw was covered. Ciznek stuck pins in a map and examined the result. It looked as if Warsaw might be the home of the killer, since the murders took place all round it. But one thing was noticeable. The murders extended much farther south than north, and there were also more of them to the south. It rather looked as if the killer had gone to Bialystock, Lomza and Olsztyn as a token gesture of extending his boundaries. Assuming, then, that the killer lived somewhere south of Warsaw, where would this be most likely to be? There were five murders in the Poznan district, to the west of Warsaw. Poznan is, of course, easily reached from Warsaw. But where in the south could it be reached from just as easily? Cracow was an obvious choice. So was Katowice, twenty miles or so from Cracow. This town was also at the centre of a network of railway lines.
On Christmas Eve, 1966, Cracow was suddenly ruled out as a possibility. Three service men getting on a train between Cracow and Warsaw looked into a reserved compartment and found the half naked and mutilated corpse of a girl on the floor. The leather miniskirt had been slashed to pieces; so had her abdomen and thighs. The servicemen notified the guard, and a message was quickly sent to Warsaw, who instructed the train-driver to go straight through to Warsaw, non-stop, in case the killer managed to escape at one of the intervening stations. A careful check of passengers at Warsaw revealed no one stained with blood or in any way suspicious. But the police were able to locate the latest letter from the killer, dropped into the post slot of the mail van on top of all the others. It merely said: ‘I have done it again,’ and was addressed to Zycie Warsawy. It looked as if the Red Spider had got off the train in Cracow, after killing the girl, and dropped the letter into the slot.
The girl was identified as Janina Kozielska, of Cracow. And the police recalled something else: another girl named Kozielska had been murdered in Warsaw in 1964. This proved to be Janina’s sister Aniela. For Ciznek, this ruled out Cracow as the possible home of the killer. For he would be likely to avoid his home territory. Moreover, there surely had to be some connection between the murders of the two sisters…The compartment on the Cracow-Warsaw train had been booked over the telephone by a man who said his name was Stanislav Kozielski, and that his wife would pick up the tickets. Janina had paid 1,422 zloty for them—about twenty-five pounds. Janina had come to the train alone and been shown to her compartment by the ticket inspector. She said that her husband would be joining her shortly. The inspector had also checked a man’s ticket a few moments later, but could not recall the man. It was fairly clear, then, that the Red Spider knew the girl well enough to persuade her to travel with him as his wife, and had probably paid for the ticket. He had murdered her in ten minutes or so, and then hurried off the train.
Ciznek questioned the dead girl’s family. They could not suggest who might have killed their daughter, but they mentioned that she sometimes worked as a model—as her sister had. She worked at the School of Plastic Arts and at a club called The Art Lovers Club.
Ciznek recollected that the red ink was made of artist’s paint dissolved in turpentine and water; this looked like a lead.
The Art Lovers Club proved to have one hundred and eighteen members. For an Iron Curtain country, its principles were remarkably liberal; many of its members painted abstract, tachiste and pop-art pictures. Most of them were respectable professional men—doctors, dentists, officials, newspapermen. And one of them came from Katowice. His name was Lucian Staniak, and he was a 26-year-old translator who worked for the official Polish publishing house. Staniak’s business caused him to travel a great deal—in fact, he had bought an ulgowy bilet, a train ticket that enabled him to travel anywhere in Poland.
Ciznek asked if he could see Staniak’s locker. It confirmed his increasing hope that he had found the killer. It was full of knives—used for painting, the club manager explained. Staniak daubed the paint on with a knife blade. He liked to use red paint. And one of his paintings, called ‘The Circle of Life’, showed a flower being eaten by a cow, the cow being eaten by a wolf, the wolf being shot by a hunter, the hunter being killed by a car driven by a woman, and the woman lying with her stomach ripped open in a field, with flowers sprouting from her body.
Ciznek now knew he had his man, and he telephoned the Katowice police. They went to Staniak’s address at 117 Aleje Wyzwolenia, but found no one at home. In fact, Staniak was out committing another murder—his last. It was a mere month after the train murder—31 January 1967—but he was impatient at the total lack of publicity given to the previous murder. So he took Bozhena Raczkiewicz, an 18-year-old student from the Lodz Institute of Cinematographic Arts, to a shelter built at the railway station for the use of stranded overnight travellers, and there stunned her with a vodka bottle. In accordance with his method when in a hurry, he cut off her skirt and panties with his knife. He had killed her in a few minutes between six o’clock and six twenty-five. The neck of the broken bottle had a clear fingerprint on it.
Staniak was picked up at dawn the next day; he had spent the night getting drunk. His fingerprints matched those on the bottle. He was a good-looking young man of twenty-six. And when he realized that there was no chance of escape, he confessed fully to twenty murders. He told the police that his parents and his sister had been crossing an icy road when they were hit by a skidding car, being driven too fast by the young wife of a Polish Air Force pilot. The girl had been acquitted of careless driving. Staniak had seen the picture of his first victim in a newspaper, and thought she looked like the wife of the pilot; this was his motive in killing her. He had decided against killing the wife of the pilot because it would be traced back to him.
Sentenced to death for six of the murders—the six described here—Staniak was later reprieved and sent to the Katowice asylum for the criminally insane.
Staniak, like Brady, is an example of the relatively new phenomenon of the ‘high IQ killer’. It is true that Landru, Kürten and Rees were men of some intelligence; but where murder was concerned, the intelligence was overruled. Like Earle Nelson and Fritz Haarmann, they were simply driven by a compulsion to violate. By comparison, Rees, Brady and Staniak represent a new level of motivation in serial killers. The desire to violate is less than compulsive, but they use their intelligence to justify it, asking themselves—in an almost philosophical spirit—‘Why not?’
The same pseudo-Sadeian logic lay behind a series of murders that created panic on the campuses of Michigan in the late 1960s.
At nine o’clock on a warm Sunday evening, a man relaxed on his front porch in Ypsilanti, Michigan, enjoying the first cool breeze of the day. He recognized the attractive, slightly-built brunette who was strolling towards him as Mary Fleszar, the niece of one of his workmates; she was a college student who lived in an apartment on the next corner. As she walked past him, a car slowed down, and a young man leaned out of the window and spoke to her—it sounded as if he was asking if she wanted a lift. Mary shook her head and walked on. The car turned at the next corner. A few moments later, to the man’s surprise, the car reappeared from the same direction, shot past the girl, and pulled into a private driveway, blocking her path. Once again the driver seemed to be trying to persuade her to get in, but the girl again shook her head, and walked around the rear of the car. The driver backed out and drove off down the street. As the man watched anxiously, ready to intervene, he saw that Mary was within yards of the front door of her apartment block; she was obviously safe now…
Twenty-four hours later—19 July 1967—Mary’s flatmate rang the girl’s home. Mary had apparently gone out for a breath of air the previous evening, only ten minutes after returning home, and had not been back since.
At first the police were unconcerned, pointing out that most 19-year-old college students were old enough to look after themselves, and often took off for the night without telling anyone. Mary’s parents protested that she was a quiet, studious girl, and that she had walked out in the clothes she stood up in.
The day after the police had issued a missing person report, a detective tracked down the neighbour who had seen Mary accosted by the young man. He was able to say that the car was an old model, that it looked like a Chevrolet, and that it was blueish grey.
From then on, investigations led nowhere. The Fleszars came to accept that their daughter was dead—no other theory made sense. Fortunately, they were a deeply religious family, and their faith enabled them to accept their loss as the will of God.
Four weeks after Mary’s disappearance, on 7 August 1967, two teenage boys were trying to repair a tractor in a field near Superior Township, two miles north of Ypsilanti. When they heard a car door slam, they looked at one another with mischievous smiles, and crept off into the brush towards the broken-down farmhouse at the edge of the field. Because it afforded shelter from the main road, the spot had become a lovers’ lane. But before the boys reached the area favoured by courting couples, they heard a car start up and drive away. In the clearing near the old farmhouse, they found fresh tyre tracks. They also observed a nauseating smell. A few yards further on they discovered its source—a fly-infested mass of rotten meat that looked like a dead animal. A closer look revealed that, although the extremities of the limbs were missing, it had an oddly human appearance.
The local police who hurried to the scene—and who at first assumed the boys had found a dead deer—soon recognized it as a human body. The Ypsilanti pathologist, Dr H. A. Scovill, was able to tell them that it was of a female, and that she had been baking in the hot sun for many weeks. A careful search of the area failed to discover the victim’s clothing. But fifty yards away, in dense weeds, a policeman found a female sandal. Later the same afternoon, the Fleszars identified it as their daughter’s.
The autopsy on the remains revealed that the girl had been stabbed in the chest and abdomen about thirty times—obviously by someone in a frenzy.
Two days later, a blue-grey Chevrolet pulled up in front of the Moore Funeral Home, where Mary’s remains were awaiting burial, and a powerfully built, good-looking young man got out. In the reception, he explained that he was a friend of the Fleszar family, and would like to take a photograph as a keepsake for the parents. When told that was impossible, he shrugged and left. But the girl behind the desk noticed that he was not carrying a camera…
When, almost a year later, at the beginning of another hot July, a student at Eastern Michigan University telephoned to report that her flatmate was missing, the Ypsilanti police had a sense of déjà vu. The circumstances were oddly similar to those of the disappearance of Mary Fleszar. Joan Schell, a 20-year-old art student, had returned to her apartment on the evening of Sunday 2 July—a mere three blocks from Mary’s apartment—and decided to go out again. She wanted to get into nearby Ann Arbor, to spend the night at the flat of a girlfriend. In fact, her boyfriend had telephoned to say he had arrived in town unexpectedly and was waiting there for her. Her room-mate accompanied her to catch the 10.30 bus from in front of the university. Three quarters of an hour later, it was clear that she had missed it. At that point, a two-tone red car had pulled up, and a young man climbed out and called ‘Want a ride?’ He looked about 20, and was wearing an East Michigan University sweatshirt. And since there were also two other young men in the car, Joan decided it was safe enough. Seconds later, Joan was in the back seat. But as the door closed, she called that she would telephone as soon as she reached her friend’s flat in Ann Arbor. And when, two and a half hours later, she failed to call, the flatmate decided to ring the police.
Five days later, two workmen at a construction site in Ann Arbor were taking a breather from digging storm drains when one of them wrinkled up his nose. ‘Can you smell something?’ He began looking in the high weeds. A moment later he called: ‘It’s a dead girl.’
The sex of the corpse was obvious since her blue miniskirt and white underslip had been tugged up around her neck. The torso was covered with a mass of wounds. The pathologist who was called to the scene reported that she had been stabbed to death, and had been dead for some time, perhaps a week. What intrigued the police was the evidence that the body had lain in its present location for less than twenty-four hours. This was revealed by the fact that parts of the body that had been exposed to the sun were nevertheless still fresh and undecayed, while the underside was tough and leathery. The pathologist also noted signs that the victim had been raped.
Joan Schell’s body was identified through the clothing she was wearing. A few days later, the missing boyfriend—with whom she had intended to spend the night—was located and questioned. But he had a perfect alibi. He had been waiting at the flat of Joan’s girlfriend in Ann Arbor during the crucial hours following her abduction.
But enquiries among the university students revealed a possible clue. At least two of them believed they had seen Joan late on the night she vanished, walking with a young man. And although neither of them was prepared to be positive, both thought it was an Eastern Michigan University student named John Norman Collins.
The detectives lost no time in interviewing Collins. He proved to be a well-built, handsome youth of 21 with short dark hair, who was was majoring in education. But he flatly denied being with Joan Schell. He had spent the weekend at home in the Detroit suburb of Center Line, and had not returned to his room near the campus until early Monday morning. He did not even know Joan Schell, although she lived just across the street. The detectives decided that John Collins was either innocent or a superb liar. Besides, there was the problem of the car containing three men. And since the identifications of him had not been positive, he was allowed to go.
As in the case of Mary Fleszar, the investigation soon ran out of leads. It was ten months later, on 21 March 1969, that a 13-year-old schoolboy returned home at 7.15 in the morning to tell his mother that he had found a gift-wrapped present in a shipping bag near the cemetery. A note on the package said: ‘I love you, Jane.’ Together, mother and son returned to the spot where he had found it. Outside the cemetery, near the gate, she saw something covered with a yellow raincoat. It was a girl’s body, lying on its back. Although the skirt had been pulled up above the waist, and the pantyhose rolled down, it was fully clothed. A few hours earlier, the Ypsilanti police had received a missing person report on 23-year-old Jane Mixer, a law student at the University of Michigan. A check with a photograph in the Yearbook revealed that this was the victim.
Jane had been due home that weekend, a semester recess. She had telephoned her parents in Muskegan, a few hours away, to say that she had succeeded in finding someone to give her a lift, but had never arrived. Jane had been shot in the back of the head and then strangled. A sanitary pad that was still in place indicated why there had been no sexual attack.
Four days later, on Tuesday 25 March 1969, a construction worker in Ann Arbor, working close to the spot where Joan Schell’s body had been found, tripped over an arm that was sticking out of a batch of weeds. It was the body of a young girl, lying in a rape position; a branch had been jammed into the vagina, and the head and body showed signs of a brutal beating. She was identified as 16-year-old Maralynn Skelton, and investigation revealed that she was a known drug user—and dealer—whose relations with her family were strained. She had vanished on Friday—the day Jane Mixer’s body had been found—when hitch-hiking, on her way to see her boyfriend. It seemed likely that she had been picked up by her killer. The newspapers had no doubt whatever that the killer was the man they were now calling ‘the Ypsilanti Co-ed Slayer’.
Other than that, there were no clues—no witnesses, no leads. The police were encountering total frustration. So far they had not even succeeded in finding the exact spot where any of the victims had been killed.
In that respect, at least, their luck was about to change.
Two victims in four days suggested that the Ypsilanti killer was being driven by an increasing obsession, and that unless he was caught soon, the time between the murders would grow shorter.
That fear was confirmed when, three weeks later, early on the morning of 16 April 1969, the body of another young girl was found. She was a teenager, and she was wearing only a white blouse and a white bra, pushed up around her neck. She had been strangled with black electrical flex, and her full breasts had been slashed again and again. It looked like the sadistic frenzy the police had come to associate with the Ypsilanti co-ed slayer. An early morning motorist had seen the body lying at the side of a country road near Ypsilanti, in a patch of weeds.
The girl proved to be the youngest victim yet: 13-year-old Dawn Basom, a junior high-school student. She had gone out to see friends early on the previous evening, and had failed to return home.
The police launched a thorough search of the area, and soon found both her shoes, at different locations near the body. The local sheriff, Douglas Harvey, decided to keep the discovery of the body secret, and to stake out the area in case the killer returned. But at the news conference he gave a few hours later, an embarrassed young reporter admitted that it was already too late: he had learned of the discovery from a policeman, and had promptly telephoned it to his office.
Yet the fact that the body had been found so soon after Dawn’s disappearance filled Sheriff Harvey with a sense of getting close to the killer. He ordered the search for her clothes to be extended over a wider area. And a few hours later, a deputy looking through rubble at a deserted farmhouse not far from Dawn Basom’s home found a bright orange sweater—the one Dawn had been wearing when she left home. The place was full of empty beer bottles and used condoms—it was obviously a site used by lovers. And in the basement, police discovered Dawn’s blouse, and a length of the same black electrical flex that had been used to strangle her.
They had found where Dawn had been murdered, but there were no clues to her killer: no tyre marks, footprints or anything else that might provide a lead. But a week later, when the investigation was already marking time, another clue was found in the farmhouse: a cheap gold-plated ear-ring that was identified as belonging to Dawn. It had undoubtedly not been there a few days earlier. The only conclusion was that the co-ed killer was deliberately taunting the police with their failure to catch him. Two weeks later, on 16 May, the barn at the farm site caught fire. A reporter looking over the smoking ruins the next day found five purple lilac blossoms lying nearby; they were fresh, as if newly cut. Five blossoms, five murders.
The co-ed slayer obviously had a liking for deserted farms. On the afternoon of Monday 9 June 1969, three teenage boys taking a short cut through a disused farmyard saw a body lying beside the path. It was a girl, and her torn clothes were scattered around her. The pathologist hazarded a guess that she was in her early twenties, and that she had been dead for less than a day. She had been shot in the head and stabbed repeatedly before her throat had been cut. The sheer frenzy of the attack was the signature of the co-ed slayer.
Because of the remoteness of the spot, Sheriff Harvey again decided to order a news blackout. And once again he was frustrated: one of the teenagers who had found the body had phoned the news to a local radio station that had a standing offer of $25 for news items.
The girl was identified as Alice Elizabeth Kalom, a student from Kalamazoo who was taking a design course in Ann Arbor. She had last been seen at a party for a local rock musician in the early hours of the previous Sunday morning, and left to walk home. The co-ed slayer had obviously offered her a lift.
Four murders in three months caused panic in the local community; reward money of $42,000 was offered for information. The police were heavily criticized; yet they knew that they had done everything possible to catch the killer. So far, two news leaks had frustrated their best hope of catching him. Sheriff Harvey was determined that it wouldn’t happen again.
On 23 July 1969, the campus police at Eastern Michigan University received a phone call telling them that an 18-year-old student named Karen Sue Beineman had failed to appear at dinner or in her room after curfew. By this time, the Ypsilanti police were ready to act instantly in the case of a missing girl. Karen’s room-mates told them that she had last been seen around midday, on her way to a downtown wig shop.
Joan Goshe, the proprietress of the wig shop, had an interesting story to tell. The girl had come in to pick up a small headpiece that had been made for her. As she paid $20 for it, she made the comment that she had done two foolish things in her life: bought a wig, and accepted a lift on a motorcycle from a complete stranger—the young man who was now waiting outside. Joan Goshe had commented that accepting lifts from strangers was not safe these days. But she had to admit that the young man looked decent enough—good-looking, with short dark hair. He was wearing a horizontal-striped sweater. A few minutes later, Karen had roared off on the back of his motorcycle. An assistant in the Chocolate House next door was able to identify it as a Triumph.
Another girl student who was interviewed described how a good-looking young man in a horizontal-striped sweater had recently tried hard to persuade her to go for a ride on his motorbike, but had only shrugged good-humouredly when she declined.
Four days later, a doctor and his wife out for an afternoon walk found Karen Sue Beineman’s body in a wooded gully not far from their suburban home. The naked corpse lay on its belly as if rolled over the edge. As soon as Sheriff Harvey received the call, he gave orders for a news blackout. Like most of the other victims, Karen had been strangled and brutally beaten. Medical examination revealed that she had been raped and that her panties had been stuffed into her vagina. One curious fact noted by the medical examiner was that there were human hair-clippings stuck to the panties.
That night, the gully was surrounded by police officers, and in the place of Karen Sue Beineman lay a store mannequin.
Towards midnight, a storm broke, and the watchers did their best to keep out of sight while bitten by gnats and soaked by the rain. Shortly after midnight, one of the policemen thought he saw a man running out of the gully; the heavy rain had prevented him from seeing him earlier. He tried to contact colleagues on his walkie-talkie, but the rain had made it inoperative. By the time he had made his way to other watchers on the main road, the man was already far away. They heard an engine start up, and a car drive away. The police followed, but they were too late. What had happened, they realized, was that the killer had made his way back to the ‘body’, found it was a mannequin, and left at top speed. To the frustrated police, the luck of the co-ed slayer seemed inexhaustible.
In fact, it had already run out. Descriptions of the young man on the motorbike had led a young campus policeman, Larry Mathewson, to note their similarity to one of his former Fraternity fellows, John Norman Collins, the student who had already been interviewed in connection with the death of Joan Schell. He succeeded in borrowing a photograph of Collins from a fellow student, and showed it to Joan Goshe, the wig-shop owner. Both Joan Goshe and her assistant identified it as the young man who had been waiting for Karen Sue Beineman on his motorcycle.
The Sunday evening after the stake-out, two young policemen called on John Norman Collins at the pleasant, wooden frame house at 619 Emmet Street that he shared with his friend Arnold Davis. They were enthusiastic but inexperienced, and one of them tried to shock Collins into an admission by telling him that he had been the last person seen with Karen Sue Beineman. Collins said there must be some mistake. When the police asked if he was willing to take a lie-detector test, he flushed and said: ‘I guess so.’
When he got back to his room after the interview, Collins told Davis indignantly that the police had accused him of being the co-ed slayer. But Davis was later to describe how, the following evening, Collins emerged from his bedroom with a box covered in a blanket. As he opened the door for Collins, Davis glimpsed its contents: women’s shoes and clothing, and a woman’s bag. Collins returned later without the box.
On the evening of Tuesday 29 July 1969, Police Corporal David Leik returned from a twelve-day holiday with his wife Sandra, and three young sons. The following morning, Mrs Leik carried a basket of washing down to the machine in the basement, and was mildly annoyed to notice patches of black paint on the concrete floor. Her husband denied all knowledge of it, and was puzzled to realize that the paint had the dull finish of spray paint. There had been a can of black spray paint in the basement, but it had gone.
His wife pointed out that some washing powder and a bottle of ammonia were also missing. Only one person could have taken them: her nephew, who had kept an eye on the house and fed the dog in their absence. But why should he spray black paint on the floor?
They were still puzzling about it when the telephone rang. It was the police post down on Michigan Avenue, and the sergeant asked if David Leik would mind coming over immediately. Half an hour later, Leik was talking to Sergeant Chris Walters, who lost no time in explaining why he needed to see him so urgently:
‘That nephew of yours, John Collins. He’s the prime suspect in these co-ed murders.’
Leik was incredulous; Collins was like a younger brother. But when Walters had outlined the strength of the evidence, and mentioned that Collins had backed down from taking a lie-detector test, the shaken Leik had to acknowledge that there was very powerful evidence that his nephew could be the co-ed slayer.
He decided against telling his wife; although only ten years Collins’s senior, Sandra seemed to regard him as a son. But late that night, Leik tiptoed down to the basement and scraped off some of the black paint with a knife. Underneath, there was a stain that looked ominously like blood.
Early the next morning, while his wife and children were still asleep, Leik hurried to the police post to report his find; he returned to find his wife on the telephone to Collins. ‘John wants to know if you’ve found anything about that black paint yet.’ ‘Not yet,’ said Leik. Then, when she had hung up, he tried to tell her, as gently as possible, that her sister’s youngest son was almost certainly the co-ed killer. Sandra was shattered by the news, and cried uncontrollably for a long time.
The lab men arrived two hours later. After erecting floodlights, they scraped fragments of the brown stain on to paper, and tested it with benzidine solution. If it had been blood, the benzidine should have turned blue-green; in fact, it remained transparent.
One forensic expert remarked: ‘It looks like a varnish stain.’
Leik clapped a hand to his forehead. ‘Oh my God! Of course! I used varnish on some window shutters…I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry. What I’d like to know is why someone covered up varnish stains with spray paint.’
As the lab men went on studying the floor, one of them peered into the space next to the washing machine. What he saw was hair—tiny clippings of human hair. Leik explained that his wife cut the children’s hair in the basement. He looked stunned when the lab man explained that tiny clippings of hair had been found inside the panties that the killer had stuffed into Karen Sue Beineman’s vagina.
A closer examination of the floor revealed tiny brown spots that looked like—and proved to be—bloodstains. They also proved to be of human origin.
That afternoon, David Leik and Police Captain Walter Stevens called on John Collins. Collins looked shaken when told he was the prime suspect, and when Stevens told him that the stains on the basement floor had been varnish, he burst into tears. They expected a confession; but Collins pulled himself together, and continued to deny knowing anything about Karen Sue Beineman. Later the same day, after laboratory examination had revealed that the bloodstains were of the same type as Karen’s, John Norman Collins was placed under arrest.
A search of Collins’s rooms failed to reveal anything incriminating; the detectives cursed when his room-mate Arnold Davis told them of the box that Collins had disposed of on the previous Monday evening. It had almost certainly contained evidence to tie Collins to the earlier murders. Examination of the basement furnace revealed nothing but ashes. What it meant was that the only evidence against Collins were the hairs and human bloodstains found in Leik’s basement. If these failed to convince a jury—and juries are notoriously unwilling to convict on purely circumstantial evidence—John Collins might still go free. And if Collins had not made the absurd mistake of spraying varnish stains with black paint, the evidence in Leik’s basement would never have been discovered.
Collins’s friend Arnold Davis provided some interesting insights into the suspected killer. Collins was apparently a habitual thief; this explained how he was able to afford to run four motorcycles—he stole spare parts, even to wheels and engines—in fact, one of the motorcycles was stolen. And more recently, Collins had been committing burglaries with another former room-mate, Andrew Manuel—not because he needed the money (he was an indefatigable odd-job man), but simply for fun.
The police wanted to talk to Andrew Manuel for another reason. When Collins’s arrest had been broadcast on national news networks, it had mentioned that he had just returned from a trip to California. On 30 June that year, near Salinas, a pretty 17-year-old girl, Roxie Ann Phillips, had vanished after telling a friend that she had a date with a man called ‘John’ from Michigan; John and his friend were staying in a camper-trailer. In fact, the trailer had been left behind in Salinas—in the backyard of Andrew Manuel’s grandfather. The strangled and battered body of Roxie Ann Philips had been discovered in a ravine on 13 July. The trailer-hire company were still trying to recover their property.
Manuel was finally located in Phoenix, Arizona, and charged with burglary and stealing the trailer. He denied knowing anything about any of the murders, although he admitted hastily leaving Ypsilanti when he heard that the police had been asking questions about Collins. Eventually, he was sentenced to five years’ probation.
On 22 June 1970, the trial of John Norman Collins opened in the Washtenaw County Building in Ann Arbor before Judge John Conlin. The prosecution, led by William F. Delhey, had finally decided that he would be charged only with the murder of Karen Sue Beineman—it had been impossible to collect enough evidence to risk other charges. The defence, led by Joseph Louisell, an immensely successful lawyer from nearby Detroit, spent two weeks challenging jurors who might be prejudiced, so the actual trial opened on 20 July.
It was uphill work for the defence. The wig-shop owner and the assistant from the Chocolate House testified that it had been Collins they saw waiting outside on his motorcycle for Karen Sue Beineman; Neil Fink, for the defence, questioned them about their eyesight. Room-mate Arnold Davis was led to testify that the police had questioned him for sixty hours—the implication being that he had been harassed into testifying against Collins. Corporal David Leik (now a sergeant) was pressed about whether there was any actual evidence that Collins had been in their house while he was away, and had to admit that there was not.
But the heart of the case, as everyone realized, lay in the hair evidence. Walter Holz, a graduate chemist from the Department of Health’s Criminalistics Section, testified that the hairs in the girl’s panties were identical with those found on the Leiks’ basement floor; the defence argued that a comparison of sixty-one hairs from the panties and fifty-nine from the floor was inadequate. Similar objections were made to the evidence of other experts on hair. In due course, the defence called its own experts to object that precise identification of hairs was impossible. Louisell also suggested that the hairs in the panties might have been picked up in a girls’ dormitory if a brown-haired girl had clipped her bangs, and—when the judge sustained an objection—that they might have been picked up in the wig shop (although Louisell failed to explain how they had found their way under the girl’s clothes).
On 13 August 1970, Prosecutor Delhey concluded a brisk summary of the evidence with the remark that common sense dictated a verdict of guilty. Louisell rested his defence on the uncertainty of the hair evidence. But when having lunch with the judge and the prosecutor, he admitted that he expected a guilty verdict. He was correct. On Wednesday 19 August 1970, the jury brought in a unanimous verdict of guilty. Two days later, John Collins was sentenced to life imprisonment—meaning a minimum of twenty years. He heard the sentence with the same impassivity he had shown throughout the trial.
What motivated a personable young student—known as a good athlete, an excellent student and an ‘all-American boy’—to kill eight or more young women? The answer is that we do not know. His family background had been unstable. His father left his mother for another woman soon after John Collins’ birth in 1947; her second marriage lasted only a year; her third husband turned out to be an alcoholic who beat her and the the children—she divorced him when Collins was 9. In his early years at college it suddenly became clear that he was less than honest—he was suspected of taking $40 from the entertainment fund, and of numerous petty thefts. One of his professors suspected him of some ‘pretty ambitious cheating’. So, like so many men who graduate to murder—Landru, Petiot, Smith, Heath—he had a deeply ingrained crooked streak. We can only assume that, as a highly sexed young man, this crooked streak led him to ‘steal’ sex as he had earlier stolen money and motorcycles, and that—as in the case of Ian Brady—he knew how to overrule his conscience with intellectual justifications.
By comparison, the case of another American serial killer of the late 1960s seems like a flashback to the era of Albert Fish and Earle Nelson. Although a brilliant mechanic and something of a genius with electronic equipment, Jerome Henry Brudos was anything but intellectual; his murders were as simple and compulsive as a schoolboy stealing jam tarts.
It was on 10 May 1969 that the police in Portland, Oregon knew for certain that there was a sex killer at large. A fisherman standing on the Bundy Bridge, which crossed the Long Tom River, saw something that looked like a parcel floating in the water; when he climbed down for a closer view, he realized that it was a bloated corpse, still clad in a coat. The police officers who were despatched from the Benton County sheriff’s office soon confirmed that it was the body of a girl, and that it had been weighted down with a car transmission unit that weighed as much as she did.
The forensic pathologist, Dr William Brady, estimated that the body had been in the water about two weeks. Cause of death was strangulation with a ligature. Because the body had been immersed for so long, it was impossible to determine whether she had been raped. There was one curious feature that the doctor found hard to explain. A few inches below each armpit there was a needle puncture, surrounded by an area of burn.
It was not difficult to identify the girl. She was 22-year-old Linda Dawn Salee, who had vanished just over two weeks ago, on 23 April, after leaving her office job in Portland. Her car had been found in the underground parking garage. She had failed to arrive at the swimming pool, where she was due to meet her boyfriend, who was a lifeguard. Linda had been one of many girls who had vanished in Oregon during the past two years.
Police divers spent the next two days searching the river for clues. It was on the morning of Monday 12 May that one of them located another body, fifty feet from the spot where Linda Salee had been found. This one was also weighted down with a car part—this time a cylinder head. And since the pathologist estimated that the body had been in the water for around two months, this suggested that it was 19-year-old Karen Sprinker, a university student from the Oregon State University in Corvallis, who had vanished on 27 March. Her parents soon verified the identification. Karen had been due to meet her mother for lunch in a department store in Salem, Oregon, but had failed to arrive. Her car was found in the parking garage, still locked.
Again, there were some curious—and grisly—features. The body was fully clothed, but the cotton bra had been replaced by a waist-length black bra that was too big. Both breasts had been removed, and in their place were two screwed-up pieces of brown paper. Like Linda Salee, Karen had been strangled with a ligature.
Linda and Karen were only two of a dozen girls who had vanished in Oregon in the past two years. Before the Long Tom river discovery, only one of them had been found: a skeleton lying on the banks of a creek had been identified as that of 16-year-old Stephanie Vilcko, who had vanished from her Portland home in July 1968. But two other cases bore an ominous resemblance to those of Linda and Karen. Linda Slawson, a 19-year-old encyclopedia saleswoman, had failed to return to her Portland home on 26 January 1968. And 23-year-old Susan Jan Whitney had vanished en route from Eugene, Oregon, to McMinnville, south of Portland, on 26 November 1968. Her car was found parked by the highway, incapacitated by a mechanical defect.
The policeman who had been investigating the disappearance of Karen Sprinker was Detective Jim Stovall. Now her body had been found, but he still had no clues to her killer, except that he was probably an electrician—both bodies had been tied with electrical wire—and a car mechanic, an inference based on the car parts used to weight the bodies.
Stovall decided to begin at the Corvallis campus, eighty miles south of Portland, where Karen had been a student. Stovall and his colleague Jim Daugherty took over a room on campus and spent days talking to every girl student in the university. The only possible leads that materialized were several mentions of a stranger who had made a habit of telephoning the hall of residence, asking for various girls by their first names. When a girl answered, he would talk at some length about himself, claiming to be a Vietnam veteran, and giving other details—such as that he was ‘psychic’. He usually asked for a date, but seemed unoffended when refused. It was when one of the girls mentioned that she had agreed to meet the ‘Vietnam veteran’ that Stovall’s interest suddenly increased.
The man had seemed interested when she mentioned that she was taking a psychology course, and told her that he had been a patient at the Walter Reed Hospital, where he had learned about some interesting new techniques. When he suggested coming to the dorm for a coffee, the girl agreed.
The man’s appearance had been a disappointment. He was overweight, freckled, and looked as if he was in his thirties. He had a round, unprepossessing face and the narrow eyes gave him an oddly cunning look, like a schoolboy who is planning to steal the jam tarts. But he seemed pleasant enough, and they sat in the lounge and talked at some length. Nevertheless, she had the feeling that he was a little ‘odd’. This suddenly came into focus when he placed a hand on her shoulder and remarked: ‘Be sad.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Think of those two girls whose bodies were found in the river…’ And when he left, he asked her to go for a drive, and when she declined, made the curious comment: ‘How do you know I wouldn’t take you to the river and strangle you?’
Stovall and Daugherty began to feel excited when the girl told them that the ‘Vietnam veteran’ had mentioned that he might call again.
‘If he does, would you agree to let him come here? Then call us immediately?’
The girl was reluctant, but agreed when the police told her that they would be there before the man arrived. She merely had to make some excuse to delay him for an hour.
A week later, on Sunday 25 May, the Corvallis Police Department received the call they had been hoping for. The girl told them that the ‘Vietnam veteran’ had telephoned a few minutes ago, asking if he could come over. The girl had told him she wanted to wash her hair, and asked him to make it in about an hour.
When the overweight, freckle-faced man in a tee shirt walked into the lounge of Callaghan Hall, two plain-clothes policeman walked up to him and produced their badges. The man seemed unalarmed; he gave his name as Jerry Brudos, and said that he lived in Salem; the only sign of embarrassment was when he admitted that he had a wife and two children. He was now in Corvallis, he explained, because he was working nearby—as an electrician.
Brudos had committed no offence for which he might be arrested, or even taken in for questioning. But when they escorted him outside to his green Comet station wagon, the policemen made a note of its licence number.
A preliminary check on Brudos showed that he was what he claimed to be—an electrician working in Corvallis. But when Stovall looked into his record, he realized that he had a leading suspect. Jerome Henry Brudos, 30 years of age, had a record of violence towards women, and had been in the State Mental Hospital. Moreover, at the time of the disappearance of Linda Slawson, Brudos had lived in Portland, in the area where she was trying to sell encyclopedias.
The first thing to do was to check him out. Stovall called on Brudos at his home in Center Street, Salem, and talked to him in his garage. Stovall’s colleague, Detective Jerry Frazier, also went along, and noted the lengths of rope lying around the room, and the hook in the ceiling. He also noticed that one of the ropes was knotted, and the knot was identical to one that had been used to bind the corpses in the river.
This, Stovall decided, had to be their man. Everything fitted. He worked as an electrician and car repairman. He had been working at Lebanon, Oregon, close to the place where Jan Whitney’s car had been found. And he had been living close to the place from which Karen Sprinker had disappeared in Salem.
There was another piece of evidence that pointed to Brudos. On 22 April, a 15-year-old schoolgirl had been grabbed by an overweight, freckled man holding a gun, as she hurried to school along the railroad tracks; she had screamed and succeeded in running away. She immediately picked out the photograph of Jerry Brudos from a batch shown to her by the detectives.
Except for this identification, there was no definite evidence against Brudos. This is why Stovall was reluctant to move against him. But five days after Brudos had been questioned in Corvallis, Stovall realized he could no longer take the risk of leaving him at large. As he was on his way to arrest Brudos for the attempted abduction of the schoolgirl on the railway tracks, he received a radio message saying that Brudos and his family had left Corvallis, and were driving towards Portland. Shortly after this, Brudos’s station wagon was stopped by a police patrol car. At first it looked as if Brudos was not inside; but he proved to be lying in the back, hidden under a blanket.
Back at the Salem police station, Brudos was asked to change into overalls. When he removed his clothes, he was found to be wearing ladies’ underwear.
When Stovall first questioned Brudos, he failed to secure any admissions. It was the same for the next three days. Stovall did not ask outright if Brudos had murdered the girls; he confined himself to general questions, hoping to pick more clues. But at the fifth interview, Brudos suddenly began to talk about his interest in female shoes and underwear. Then he described how he had followed a girl in attractive shoes, broken into her home through a window, and made off with the shoes. Soon after this, he described how he had stolen the black bra—found on Karen Sprinker’s body—from a clothesline. Now, at last, he had virtually admitted the killing. Then, little by little, the rest came out—the curious history of a psychopath who suffered from the curious sexual abnormality for which the psychologist Alfred Binet coined the word fetishism.
In Jerry Brudos’s case, it first showed itself when he was five years old, when he found a pair of women’s patent leather shoes on a rubbish dump, and put them on at home. His mother was furious and ordered him to return them immediately; instead he hid them and wore them in secret. When his mother found them, he was beaten and the shoes were burned. In first grade at school, he was fascinated by the high-heeled shoes that his teacher kept as spares; one day he stole them and hid them in the schoolyard; they were found and handed back to the teacher. When he later confessed, and she asked him why he did it, he rushed out of the room. The truth was that he could not have told her.
When he was 16—in 1955—he stole the underwear of a girl who lived next door. Then he approached the girl and told her he was working for the police as an undercover agent, and could help her to recover the stolen articles. She allowed herself to be lured into his bedroom on an evening when his family was away. Suddenly, a masked man jumped on her, threatened her with a knife, and made her remove all her clothes. Then, to her relief, he merely took photographs of her with a flashlight camera. At the end of the session, the masked man walked out of the bedroom, and a few minutes later, Jerry Brudos rushed in, claiming that the masked intruder had locked him in the barn. The girl knew he was lying, but there was nothing she could do about it.
In April 1956, Brudos invited a 17-year-old girl for a ride in his car. On a deserted highway, he dragged her from the car, beat her up and ordered her to strip. A passing couple heard her screams, and Brudos actually agreed to accompany them back to their home, where they called the police. His story that the girl had been attacked by ‘some weirdo’ was soon disproved, and he was arrested. The girl next door now came forward, and told her story of the photographic session.
Psychiatrists who examined the young Brudos decided that he was not mentally ill and—in spite of the beating he had administered—had no violent tendencies. Back in his home, police found a large box of women’s underwear and shoes. They sent him to the Oregon State Hospital for observation, and he was released after nine months.
A period in the army followed, but he was discharged because of his bizarre delusions—he was convinced that a beautiful Korean girl sneaked into his bed every night to seduce him.
Back in Salem, he attacked a young girl one night and stole her shoes. He did it again in Portland. Then, just as it looked as if nothing could stop him from turning into a rapist, he met a gentle 17-year-old girl who was anxious to get away from home, and who agreed to marry him. She was sometimes a little puzzled by his odd demands—making her dress up in silk underwear and high-heeled shoes and pose for photographs—but assumed that most men were like this.
While his wife was in hospital having a baby, Brudos followed a girl who was wearing pretty shoes. When he broke into her room that night, she woke up, and he choked her unconscious. Then, unable to resist, he raped her. He left her apartment carrying her shoes.
Now he was like a time bomb, waiting for another opportunity to explode. It happened when an encyclopedia saleswoman knocked on his door one winter evening…
Linda Slawson—a slight, plain girl with short-cropped hair—had seen Brudos in his yard in Portland, and asked if he was interested in buying encyclopedias. He had invited her into his garage, explaining that his wife had visitors. And when she bent down to take an encyclopedia from her case, he had knocked her unconscious with a heavy piece of wood. Then he knelt beside her and strangled her to death. Brudos’s mother was upstairs, together with his two children; he sent them out to get supper at a hamburger joint, then hurried back to his garage.
To his delight, the dead girl was wearing pretty underwear. Brudos opened the box of panties and bras he had stolen from clotheslines, and spent the next hour or so dressing and undressing the body like an oversize doll. Oddly enough, he felt no desire to rape her. That night, when his family was asleep, he loaded the body into his station wagon, drove it out to the Willamette River, and tossed it off the bridge, weighted down with part of a car engine. He kept only one part of her—a foot—in the freezer in his garage; he wanted it to try shoes on…
That November, he found his second victim. On his way home from work in Lebanon, he stopped beside a car that had broken down on the freeway. The driver was student Jan Whitney, and she had two passengers—two male hippies to whom she had given a lift. Brudos explained that he was a car mechanic, but that unfortunately he did not have his tools with him. He would be glad to go home and get them…The three climbed into his station wagon, and were driven to Salem. There the two hippies got out. Back in his garage, Brudos left the girl while he went to check that his wife was not at home—she was going out to visit friends for the evening. Then he moved into the seat behind the unsuspecting girl, looped a leather strap round her neck, and strangled her. After that he placed her in the rear seat of his car and performed an act of anal sex. He spent the next hour or so ‘playing dolls’, dressing and undressing the body, taking photographs, and also committing rape. Finally, he suspended her by the wrists from a hook in the ceiling.
This time Brudos was determined not to dispose of the body the same day; he was enjoying his plaything. For the next two days he hurried down to his garage after work—it was locked, so his family could not wander in—and played dolls again. He even removed one of her breasts, with the intention of making a paperweight, but finally abandoned the idea because the hardener failed to set satisfactorily.
A few days later, his necrophiliac obsession nearly brought about his downfall. He took his family to Portland for Thanksgiving—28 November—leaving the girl hanging in his garage. When he got back, he saw to his alarm that a corner of his garage had been demolished. A car driver had gone out of control and knocked a hole in the wall. The police had come to investigate, but were unable to get into the garage. A policeman who had peered through the hole in the wall had failed to see the body in the dark garage. Brudos lost no time in moving Jan Whitney into the pumphouse before he called the police and allowed them to inspect his garage. That same night he threw her into the Willamette River, weighed down with scrap iron.
After this close shave, Brudos made no more attempts at abduction until the following March. He drove to the Meier and Frank department store in Salem on Saturday the 27th, and was ‘turned on’ by a girl in high-heeled shoes and a miniskirt. He parked and hurried into the store looking for her, but she was nowhere to be seen. But walking back towards his car he saw a pretty girl with long dark hair about to get into her car. He grabbed her by the shoulder, pointed a pistol at her, and said: ‘Come with me and I promise not to hurt you.’ Instead of screaming—which would probably have saved her life—Karen Sprinker begged him not to shoot, and accompanied him to his car. Brudos drove her back to his garage, then ordered her out at gunpoint. She told him she would do whatever he liked. Brudos asked her if she was a virgin; she said yes, and added that she was having her period. (This part of the confession confirmed Stovall’s belief that he had the right man; Karen’s mother had told him that the girl was menstruating.) Brudos made her lie on the floor and raped her. Afterwards, the girl said she had to go to the toilet; Brudos took her into the house and allowed her to use the family bathroom. (His wife was away again.) Then he took her back to the garage and made her pose for pictures—some in her white cotton panties and bra, some in the more ‘glamorous’ stolen underwear and patent leather high-heeled shoes. Finally he tied her hands behind her, placed a rope round her neck, and pulled on it. He asked the girl if it was too tight, and she said it was. Then Brudos pulled her clear of the ground, and watched her suffocate. ‘She kicked a little and died.’ Brudos then violated the corpse. Later still he repeated the violation, cut off her breasts, and disposed of her remains in the Long Tom River that same evening, weighted down with a cylinder head.
Linda Salee, a pretty, athletic little girl (only five feet one inch tall) was also walking to her car—her arms loaded with packages—when Brudos approached her, showed her a police badge, and told her he was arresting her for shoplifting. She believed him, and protested that she had sales slips to prove that she had paid for the parcels. Brudos told her he was ‘taking her in’, and drove her back to his garage.
Like Karen Sprinker, Linda Salee behaved with a docility that undoubtedly cost her life. Brudos drove into the garage and closed the doors. Then he told her to follow him, and started across the yard to the house. At this point, Brudos’s wife came out on the porch, and Brudos turned and signalled the girl to stand still. A single scream now—or a run for the gate—would have saved her life. Darcie Brudos failed to see her, and her husband took the girl back into the garage and tied her up. Then, incredibly, he went into the house for dinner. By the time Brudos returned—his wife had now gone out—the girl had freed herself, but had not picked up the garage telephone and called the police. ‘She was just waiting for me, I guess,’ said Brudos.
Now, too late, she decided to put up a fight. But she was no match for the overweight killer. When he had subdued her, Brudos put the leather strap around her neck and tightened it. The girl asked: ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ Then she went limp. Brudos was in the act of raping her as she died.
Now, to ‘punish’ her, Brudos suspended her by the neck from the hook in the ceiling. He had decided to try an experiment. He stuck two hypodermic syringes into her ribs on either side—these were the two puncture marks that puzzled the pathologist—and attached them to electric wires. When he switched on the current, he was hoping she would dance. ‘Instead it just burned her.’
Brudos kept her for another day, and violated the body just once more. This time he experienced no temptation to cut off the breasts; he did not like the pink nipples. (‘They should be brown.’) Instead he decided to make plastic moulds of the breasts; but the epoxy fibre glass somehow failed to work. On the second night, Brudos drove the body away in his station wagon, and dumped it in the Long Tom River, weighted down with a car overdrive unit.
Brudos made these confessions with a certain pedantic precision, as if explaining how to dismantle a gear box; it never seemed to strike him that Detective Jim Stovall might be horrified or sickened. In fact, Stovall went out of his way not to react; he had no wish to interrupt the flow of confession.
Brudos was charged with the murder of Karen Sprinker. The following day, a search warrant was issued, and the detectives entered the empty house—Darcie Brudos had moved away, together with her children. In the attic, police found his collection of shoes, girdles, bras and panties—dozens of them. On the living room shelf there was a replica of a female breast—at least, it looked like a replica until they looked more closely, and saw that it was real, and that it had been made solid with epoxy. In the basement, they found a tool box that contained photographs of the missing girls—some suspended from the hook in the ceiling, others posing for Brudos’s camera in underwear. The police were to learn that Brudos had telephoned his wife from prison, and asked her to destroy the contents of the tool box; for once in her life, she had decided to disobey him.
One picture found under the workbench incriminated Brudos beyond all possible doubt. He had photographed the hanging girl reflected in a mirror lying below her on the floor, and had inadvertently caught his own reflection too.
Because Brudos pleaded guilty to four counts of murder, he was sentenced without trial to life imprisonment. When a neighbour alleged that she had seen Darcie Brudos helping her husband to force a woman wrapped in a blanket into her home, Darcie was charged with taking part in the murder of Karen Sprinker. But the jury found her not guilty. By the time she was acquitted, her husband had already started to serve his term of life imprisonment in the Oregon State Penitentiary.
His first year in prison was a difficult one. Sex criminals are detested by other prisoners, and are often kept segregated for their own good. Brudos was not segregated; but he was ignored. No one would talk to him or eat with him. He lost a great deal of weight. When someone managed to give him a hard blow on the side of the head with a bucket of water, he was taken to the prison hospital; but there proved to be no grounds for the suspicion that his eardrum was perforated.
In later years, Brudos’s life improved. He proved to have a natural gift for electronics, and was soon virtually running the prison’s computer system. The prison authorities have also allowed him, to some small extent, to pursue his lifelong interest in women’s shoes and undergarments. His cell has stacks of mail order catalogues full of glossy photographs. Once again, Jerome Henry Brudos is living in his own private world. But now, fortunately, there are no real women who can be forced into helping him act out his fantasies.
Two of the most widely publicized murder cases of the 1960s qualify as mass murders—or ‘spree killings’—rather than serial killings, but both deserve a brief mention at this point.
On 13 July 1966, 24-year-old Richard Speck knocked on a door in a nurses’ hostel in Jeffrey Manor, Chicago, and pointed a gun at the Filipino nurse who opened it. He ordered her into another bedroom where three nurses were sleeping, and bound and gagged them. Speck smelt strongly of alcohol, but he kept assuring the women that he had no intention of hurting them. Five more nurses came in late, and were also bound and gagged. Then, one by one, he took the nurses into the next room. The Filipino, Corazon Amurao, struggled to free herself and tried to persuade the others to attack the man, but no one was prepared to act. Corazon Amurao rolled under a bunk, and lay there, hoping the man would not look for her. Fortunately, he seemed to lose count. When he finally left at 5 a.m., she looked into the next room, and saw that the other eight nurses were dead. She screamed for help from the balcony. Police who entered the hostel soon after found that seven of the girls had been stabbed to death, the eighth strangled. Only one, Gloria Davy, had also been raped and sodomized.
Corazon Amurao described the killer as pockmarked, with a tattoo ‘Born to raise hell’ on his arm. He was quickly identified through a nearby seamen’s hiring hall, where he had applied for a berth, and his name and description published in newspapers. Two days later, a doctor attending a patient who had been admitted with slashed wrists recognised the ‘Born to raise hell’ tattoo, and sent for the police.
In court, spectators who had expected to see a monster were astonished to find that the multiple killer looked like a down-at-heel nobody. Psychiatrists learned that Speck had been a delinquent all his life. A man of low self-esteem, he could be modest and agreeable when sober, but became boastful and violent when drunk. A nurse who had dated him said that he seemed to be seething with hatred and resentment. At 20 he had married a 15-year-old girl, whom he had come to hate. He had raped a 65-year-old woman during a burglary, and was believed to be responsible for the murder of a barmaid. He was also in the area of Indiana Harbour when three girls wearing swimsuits vanished one day—their bodies were never found.
Sentenced to a total of six hundred years in jail, Richard Speck died of a heart attack on 5 December 1991, a day before his fiftieth birthday.
Charles Manson, who was sentenced to death in April 1971, may or may not have actually killed anyone, but his followers—known as ‘the Family’—killed at least nine people, possibly more. (Their prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, estimates thirty-five.)
When Charles Manson was released from jail in 1967—at the age of 32—he had spent most of his life in prisons or reformatories. When he came to San Francisco, and found himself among flower children and hippies, all smoking pot and preaching sexual abandon, he felt he had arrived in heaven. Manson, who played the guitar and advocated a rambling philosophy of freedom not unlike that of Aleister Crowley (‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’), was soon regarded as a kind of guru among the young people of the Haight-Ashbury district, many of whom were runaways. In the following year, surrounded by a crowd of disciples—mostly female—Manson moved into a ranch owned by an old man named George Spahn, who allowed them to live rent free in exchange for stable work and sexual favours from the girls.
One respectable college graduate named Charles Watson fell under Manson’s spell and joined the ‘family.’ He later described to FBI agent Robert Ressler how Manson preached a philosophy of total abandonment of the ego—‘cease to exist’—which was reinforced by sessions with psychedelic drugs and sexual promiscuity. When they were stoned on LSD, Manson would paint word pictures of murder and torture. He dreamed of some tremendous social revolution—‘Helter skelter’—in which the pigs (bourgeoisie) would be finally suppressed, and blacks would be exterminated. To some extent, these vengeful dreams were the outcome of his own constantly dashed hopes of achieving fame as a pop musician.
One of the male disciples, Bobby Beausoleil, murdered a drug dealer named Gary Hinman—after Manson had sliced off Hinman’s ear. Watson, who now thought of himself as Manson’s rival—or at least, chief lieutenant—decided that it was time to assert his own authority, and realize Manson’s dreams of slaughter. He agrees that Manson did not specifically tell him to go out and kill, but is certain that Manson wanted it. Watson led a band of three female disciples to the house of film actress Sharon Tate on 8 August 1969—her husband Roman Polanski was in Europe, and she had three guests to dinner—an ex-lover and a Polish writer and his mistress. Entering the drive of the house, they shot and killed a teenage boy who was just leaving, then went into the house, bound the four occupants, then shot and stabbed them all to death—Sharon Tate, who was pregnant, was stabbed in the stomach. After the murders, Manson is believed to have gone to the house, to make sure everyone was dead.
That evening, there were two more victims—supermarket owner Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary. Manson entered the house first and tied them at gunpoint, then invited in Watson and two female disciples, who stabbed the LaBiancas to death, and wrote ‘Death to pigs’ on the walls in their blood. (The intention was to try to convince the world that the murders were the work of Black Panthers, and to try to start a massacre of blacks by whites.)
Two months later, after the ‘family’ had moved to a deserted ranch in Death Valley, most of them were arrested on suspicion of burning a bulldozer belonging to park rangers. In prison, Susan Atkins, who had been one of the three who killed Sharon Tate, could not resist dropping hints about the murders to fellow prisoners, who in turn told the police.
The trial was one of the longest and most expensive in Los Angeles history (until the Hillside Stranglers a decade later), and ended with seven of the ‘family’—including Manson and Watson—being sentenced to death or life imprisonment.
Unlike the Moors murders in England, the Manson case aroused a great deal of support for the accused, particularly among the beatnik and hippie population of the west coast. The feeling seemed to be that Manson was a genuine rebel against bourgeois society, and that his plea that this society had ‘made his children what they were’ had some justification. In fact, it is hard to see how Manson was any more justified than Brady. Both were inspired by a kind of mysticism of death and violence—a mysticism that had its roots in the ego. And, in spite of a genuine element of self-actualization, both must be classified as self-esteem killers.
1 See Brother Twelve, by John Oliphant (McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1991).
2 The Kirtland Massacre, by Cynthia Statter Sasse and Peggy Murphy (Willder, Donald I. Fine Inc., New York, 1991).
3 Brady and Hindley: Genesis of the Moors Murders (Ashgrove Press, Bath 1986).